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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> The author really nailed the pixel perfect fonts — it looks perfect on my low-DPI and high-DPI displays.

It has some weird rainbow effect to it on mine, and the background flickers when I scroll.

Yeah, it looks like the font is scaled slightly wrong along the x-axis, so that the displayed pixels don't quite line up with screen pixels. Specifically, the text is rendered about 0.5% too narrow, causing a moire-type pattern that repeats about every 200 pixels.

Adding this custom CSS rule seems to fix it for me:

    p { transform: scale(1.005, 1); }

Same here, I think it's caused by the font it's using (BitGeneva12 [1], which obviously is a geneva [2] clone but I can't find where it (the font) is from. Maybe the author created it themselves?).

[1]

    src: url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.eot);
    src: url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.eot?iefix) format('eot'),url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.woff) format('woff'),url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.ttf) format('truetype'),url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.svg#webfontx0MbJbLm) format('svg');

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_(typeface)

This seems to be because Firefox has no way to disable text antialiasing (whereas Safari and Chrome support -webkit-font-smoothing), so Firefox is trying to antialias a pixel font which just looks weird

Nope, I'm using Chromium.

Digging into it, it looks like the various CSS font smoothing selectors only work on macOS, not Linux or Windows.

Same here. Also a more minor issue for people like myself, the site causes some 'glare'(?) and is difficult to look at.

I've had this issue since my childhood, now that I think of it. On paper (especially grids) and websites. I should probably figure out what it is.

Do you have astigmatism?

I just looked it up and based off of anecdotal evidence, I think the answer is yes.

I have had glasses for nearsightedness in my left eye but it isn't bad enough for most situations. Never had an eye exam in my life.

I have astigmatism. I had the same issue with grids, certain fonts with lots of vertical lines, and other regular high contrast repeating patterns.

Got some glasses a few years ago for the first time from an optometrist, and now it doesn’t bother me anymore.

So I would recommend getting it checked out.

Thankyou for the recommendation! I'll go about scheduling that.

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