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Comment by blululu | Hacker News Reader

This is a surprisingly nice type face. It looks blocky when blown up, but it is really clean for small text. It took me a second to zoom in on the text and realize that the article is written in the typeface itself. I'm curious is there might be a legibility benefit to having a more rectilinear font. Perhaps the transfer function of TTF's anti-aliasing is cleaner along the horizontal and vertical axes rather than along a diagonal or curve. Having a less curvy font might be easier to render since the edges align with the display.

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Interestingly, many fonts look very strange when zoomed in because they employ all kinds of tricks to exploit optical illusions to give their fonts particular expression, such as curves and pinches that are almost imperceptible when viewed at a normal size. Unfortunately at the moment I can't find an article which clearly demonstrates what I'm talking about.

Hinting is what that's called.

I think ~warent is referring to features like ink traps, which are features that do look strange up-close, but might help increase contrast or other qualities at small sizes.

Maybe overshoot as well?

That's a separate concept, he probably means ink traps and optical size adjustments.

Hinting is the explicit adjustment of a font’s outlines to snap it to the pixel grid. It’s a similar outcome, but different process.

I think you’re referring to “optical sizing” in fonts. In essence, fonts at small sizes are more robust and large sizes have more detail. Very much like comic books illustration, for example. If you blow up a small face on a comic strip and compare to a big face, the big face will have a lot more fine detail. The small face will be simplified and more gestural, so it can be “read” at small sizes.

Tobias Frere-Jones has some blog posts on Typeface Mechanics if you’re interested:

https://frerejones.com/blog/typeface-mechanics-001 https://frerejones.com/blog/typeface-mechanics-002

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