Hacker News Reader

Comment by simse | Hacker News Reader

25 fonts loaded! That might be a record. But seriously, very interesting stuff.

I really appreciate the look and also am interested in the content but I find this presentation super difficult to read for some reason. Maybe the text is too big and spaced out? I can't really explain it but it exhausts me just looking at it. Very weird.

I think its the contrast, the white is too bright.

Yes, we were surprised too. 25! Wait, '25'? We don't have 25 fonts... Part of that is due to a bug we hadn't noticed in the CSS versioning code & have fixed.

The actual number is more like 16 fonts (~500kb total), excluding the decorative dropcaps which are only 4kb each. This is one of the largest & most complex pages on gwern.net (even after splitting out much of it to gwern.net/gpt-3-nonfiction ), so, it pulls down pretty much every font. (Even the backup fonts, because of the emoji.)

As for why we use those fonts, well, it's not like we didn't consider using just system fonts, but you run into problems as soon as you have any ambitions: https://gwern.net/design#webfonts

In my browser, the content is mostly not present. Every now and then it renders in a region extending a little ways above and below my viewport, but if I scroll past that region, it’s gone again. And the cutoff isn’t even on a line boundary.

Never seen anything like this.

Based on another bug report, I am going to guess that you have a noscript feature enabled, and you chose to ignore the large noscript warning at the top warning you that the site is going to break in a bunch of ways if you don't enable JS.

We've fixed the blanking of collapse regions with noscript... we think. So it should at least be visible. But you should know you're going to run into other errors because JS-less is not supported and is hiding an ever-increasing fraction of the site from you, between annotations & transcludes.

Kanzlei-Initialen-T.ttf is beautiful!

If you like that, check out 'yinit' too: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb12-1/tb31hara.pdf#page=8

The layout has a sort of vaguely unhinged quality to it, which I think adds to the effect here

Would you rather have it be a plain text website? No attack, just wondering.

I don’t think 25 fonts has ever made something better. I’m sure there is a number greater than 1 but less than 25 where we can read happily.

25 fonts has made a font library better. :)

That would be great, yeah. In particular, the best type of site is one that plays nice with the user’s default font. There’s no accounting for taste after all, so just let people pick their own style.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com