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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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