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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

Their long S is really annoying, although truthfully I generally am unfamiliar with the long s in modern fonts so I don't KNOW if it really looks worse than it needs to, but I feel it looks worse that it needs to and that makes it harder, for example I thought lest at first was left and had to go back a couple words after.

Anyway as I know from my reading history at 1400 it gets difficult, but I can make it through 1400 and 1300 with difficulty, but would need to break out the middle English dictionaries for 1200 and 1100. 1000 forget it, too busy to make that effort.

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  (function() {
    const SKIP_PARENTS = new Set(["SCRIPT", "STYLE", "NOSCRIPT", "TEXTAREA"]);
    const walker = document.createTreeWalker(
      document.body,
      NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,
      {
        acceptNode(node) {
          const p = node.parentNode;
          if (!p || SKIP_PARENTS.has(p.nodeName)) return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
          if (p.nodeName === "INPUT") return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
          return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT;
        }
      }
    );

    let node;
    while ((node = walker.nextNode())) {
      node.nodeValue = node.nodeValue.replace(/ſ/g, "s");
    }
  })()

what?

That will replace the long-s with the standard s. You can do the same for the thorn.

The person you're talking to was wondering if there's a more elegant long-s font choice, not how to replace long-s with short-s.

Which LLM hallucinated this monstrosity? Just use a regex, it's a one-liner!

Hmm, I thought it wafnt fo bad, myfelf

oh my god, you're right, they just used an f, no wonder I found it so bad! That is really annoying. Enraging even.

The text doesn't use an `f`. If you copy from e.g. the 1700 passage you get `ſ` not `f`.

Probably people are confused by ligatures. Indeed it is a long S.

This is correct. And if you don't like that font's long-s, you can fix it with

document.body.style.fontFamily = "Baskerville";

Baskerville has a nice long-s. TNR is also not bad. Garamond is passable.

thanks for the Baskerville recommendation.

on edit: liked the Garamond better, since the font is a bit thicker, checked it on "ſpake" and was obviously a long S whereas on the thinner Baskerville still looked like an f to me. Although the original text was perhaps too thick for me.

hmm you're right, I guess my eyesight is worse than I thought

I should have noticed, it has a full cross bar, I guess it's my fading eyesight and also the white text of green is perhaps not the best contrast.

It doesn't have such a bar in the article e.g. "swifter" https://imgur.com/a/XwsoVgB

just noted that in reply to my post but repeat here: yeah I was wrong, I happened to look back at Maiſter and my bad eyesight and the resolution made it look like the long s had a crossbar from the t next to it in the default font.

on edit: this was probably where my problem generally was, in lest and Maister and anything where the long s is next to a t it looks very like an f to me, although if I zoom to 170% then it is clear, however at that size it introduces its own reading problems; unfortunately my reading glasses are broken so I just struggled at a lower resolution.

Heck, I still struggle scanning it properly at high resolution so no worries!

yeah I was wrong, I happened to look back at Maiſter and my bad eyesight and the resolution made it look like the long s had a crossbar from the t next to it in the default font.

Interestingly I found the long s annoying and I had to think every time I saw it, but I quickly got used to and could read it naturally after a few paragraphs.

Every time I see a long S, I am reminded of "House of Leaves", where one of the characters encounters it for the first time as well, and starts using it everywhere for awhile.

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