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Comment by coolio1232 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if I'm sounding harsh, but do people aside from hardcore typographists really care about this and similar font/text tweaking projects? I felt no noticeable difference in readability in either of the modes and for a second I even thought the before example is the "better" version they are advertising because it felt more streamlined in my eyes.

Maybe this might help people with dyslexia but don't proper dyslexia focused fonts and aids exist already?

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I was a hardcore book reader in the first part of my life, and reading on the web keeps hurting my eyes. Every typography mistake triggers me the same way a grammar one does. I'd love to have such a tool to fix typography on the fly for every webpage, including in French.

I tell my web development students that typography is Lovecraftian cursed knowledge. You can't delve too deep, or it will drive you mad.

I am by no means a typography expert, nor is it a major focus of mine. I have however spent a lot of time reading non-technical prose, and I had a visceral reaction to your comment because of how wrong it seemed. To me the after is so obviously better it struck me as though you were somebody who had never done much deep reading and mainly consumes code or short-form text.

Now, I am completely aware there is nothing behind this other than my visceral reaction. I do not know you at all. I share it only to communicate that to somebody with my background it is an obvious and fundamental improvement.

One way to gain a different perspective could be to ask a similar question, but replace typographic adjustments with something in your domain of expertise that requires deeper experience to see the value in. Assuming programming, it might be things like linting, refactoring, testing, version controlling, etc.

Linting, refactoring and testing all have obvious benifits for anyone who has done any small to medium sized project and has had to rewrite and debug some amount of code, even if they don't know the concepts by name. Even version contolling is ubiquitous in almost any entry-level programming job, even if it wasn't before.

Most people who have made a website with CSS before would at best change the font size, the line spacing and the font face and tweak it to a point that feels easily readable and call it a day. Introducing variable widths between the characters of the font, digraphs and so on feels like more like exercising artisanship that only the experts would see value in rather than solving a technical problem.

Perhaps advanced web design/typesetting is the main application of this and it has a chance of inducing a better subconscious effect on the viewer. Sort of how magazines and books were designed back in the day I suppose.

You missed the point entirely. This is basic stuff that all designers work with.

> feels like more like exercising artisanship that only the experts would see value in

Same as linting and refactoring, then.

>Linting, refactoring and testing all have obvious benifits for anyone who has done any small to medium sized project and has had to rewrite and debug some amount of code, even if they don't know the concepts by name

I'm curious but have you ever heard of anyone that works as a programmer that has not been especially keen on linting and testing (as in automated testing)?

I thought that examples of not being overly keen were quite abundant.

And it is often lamented on this site about how much work it is to get even people who have made a small to medium sized project and have the word programmer or developer in their job title to actually want to do linting and testing.

So what I'm saying is that at least for linting and testing yes, these really might seem like

>exercising artisanship that only the experts would see value in rather than solving a technical problem.

Yeah, I’ve been coding for 30 years, and to me, linting seems like alphabetizing the tools on your peg board. There are plenty of times where I want to break an expression into multiple lines—or not—in the service of readability. And there are no clear rules I could dictate to codify how I make that call.

I get that it helps people who are collaborating on large codebases. But to me, typography is orders of magnitude more important, because it’s facing the end-user.

And the answer is still no. Users / visitors don't care. We keep writing tools for ourselves and products, UIs, UXs, etc. *from the user's POV* aren't any better.

No one wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says, "I want to use an application build with React, has no tech debt, and has great commit msgs...".

I'm not suggesting the tech and stack don't matter. They do. But they are a means, not the ends. The sad fact is, the ends aren't - from the users' POV - noticeably better. More bloated? More buggy? Probably.

I’m autistic and find that well crafted typography helps me to read things more easily with less distraction. It’s not just dyslexics who might struggle with bad typography. I also know some ADHD people with similar issues to me. And 20% of the population is highly sensitive. I’m not saying it would matter for all of them, but for some, it surely does.

Whether this tool makes it “better” is another question. I tend to think there are general rules for “better” typography but when you get to the details, it depends on the individual and how they perceive and process information. One friend who is ADHD likes very cramped text which looks jumbled and messy to me, making it difficult to pick out individual letters. If the before case looks better for you, that’s a valid criticism.

My opinion: there are some objective truths about typography and readability. But some people push beyond the objective and try to enforce their personal preferences on the others as if they're fact.

As a Web Typography fan and practitioner of good typographic web standards the answer is no. You’re right. This stuff is cruft. Displays are fundamentally different from paper, and it is OK that we don’t transfer every typographic standard 1-to-1.

You can print things off the web.

Think of the trees! ;)

I'm not into fonts, but reading anything on the web sucks after you get used to LaTeX.

  - Justification is not there and it just looks bad.
  - Paragraph width is arbitrary, which makes reading some emails (from folks who apparently think the earth is not only flat, but 1D) awful to read. I'm shown a 2000px+ wide, 60+ word line for a message.
  - Long words or non-English destroy line breaks and lines break at odd places.
  - There's widows and orphans around. I think I didn't even saw this one until I was told to fix my stuff during peer review, but now I see it everywhere and it only took a couple minutes to explain the issue and kind of ruin me.
  - Non-english keeps breaking the web.
    - Probably not just on typography, but many websites are still unable to deal with not so special characters like á, à, ä ø, £ and you get to read gibberish.

I suspect this isn't about making something look 10% better - it's about making something look 0.1% better in some circumstances.

Which is totally great! The world needs lots of 0.1% improvements because 100's of them can add up to make something look or feel better when applied at the right time in the right way.

The most noticeable change is the substitution of “ for ", which doesn't require this package--this package just does it for you instead of you actually changing the character in the HTML text. (The more interesting parts of the package are some alignment and spacing stuff that is less noticeable.)

If you work with monospace terminal/code/markup a lot, you are probably very used to seeing " . But it is definitely well established that “ is appropriate for human text, Word has automatically corrected this for many years.

Ask yourself: do people really care about rounded corners in furniture? Do people really care about flowers in their balconies? Do people really care about keeping their car polished and clean? …

People have been dealing with garbage word processor programs, publishing editors, and even doing documents in vector graphics editors. Imagine using an editor that just uses HTML + CSS under the hood, it's not that far from proprietary XML formats. If these features were standard, one could create such an editor and allow its output to be viewed everywhere.

Besides, I think this is cool. Someone saw a problem and solved it. I think it looks better too. Now, if only italics were properly spaced from normal text... but that's available in CSS.

I don’t know much about typography but was schooled to be a grammar perfectionist, and this seems great to me. It’d probably help out machine translators too.

I'm with you. This makes zero difference to me.

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