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Comment by buserror | Hacker News Reader

I was pondering using Chicago as default font, but it is pretty 'typecast' (no pun intended, this time ;-)) -- Charcoal (that was used in System 8.x onward) is a lot less 'known' and also, I think, a significant improvement...

But it is actually pretty easy to switch to Chicago in the library -- apart from the clone you mention, there is also a 'plain' TTF version of the original Chicago floating around...

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Split the difference with Espy Sans as seen in Newton, eWorld, iPod Mini, and often predicted to be the default system font in “Copland” Mac OS 8 had it shipped: https://lowendmac.com/2000/using-the-espy-font/

t. satisfied Nu Sans shareware buyer http://www.scootergraphics.com/nusans/ :)

Bitmap fonts are beautiful. I think the original iPod(s) also used Apple's bitmap fonts including Chicago and Espy Sans.

I love Espy as my system font.

One benefit to having the Newton Connection Utilities and Toolkit installed is that beautiful font.

Charcoal fits the spirit of the hiDPI remake better to my eyes too. But as we're on 'spirit' and pedantry, the unaligned popup selectors in the demo look off to me, compare with

https://www.oreilly.com/api/v2/epubs/0201700042/files/020170...

or similar.

Maybe I'm weird, but I feel like that style of GUI design with OS 8 and 9 were the pinnacle of GUI styling. Well, maybe BeOS deserves mention as well. But you could put young children in front of a Mac at school, and they'd figure out how to do everything they needed to do without much help and with no distraction.

Yes there are a few tweaks to make -- I worked in 'passes' in the code, and my last 'pass' at the menus was a little while ago, normally I go and fix the little nags as I go along.

Last (big) pass was the text editor, which isn't totally finished and polished but I had to release something for the deadline ;-)

I found it fascinating that my brain readily accepts this as macOS Classic UI, even though, as you say, it's a kind of System 7++ - a neat trick to have pulled off. Then after a bit it starts nitpicking on alignment and spacing unasked, like some weird Apple Cult Manchurian Candidate.

The unaligned popup selectors scared me too... hope it won't be added to "get off my lawn"-faq ;)

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