Good type against all odds

unsung.aresluna.org

14 points·firloop··3 comments

"The interesting thing is that it could’ve gone the other way. Twice. In English or German, we treat scrolling left to be natural, and we consider only one direction of italic slant appropriate. The first has to do with the direction of reading. I believe the second is, like many things in typography, customary; there’s nothing inherently better than right-leaning letters, except we’re used to them since those are the only ones we ever see."

It is a bit funny that young people seem so far removed from handwriting nowadays, that they miss the obvious. Either that, or Martin is ambidextrous.

(For those also missing the context here: the right lean is a consequence of writing straight up/down lines as towards/away from the body when the paper is tilted at an angle conducive to writing right-handed)

Though, I think the author's point still stands here, this could have been done a different way and is largely customary. I am left-handed, for example, and I write up/down lines as parallel to the line of my arm in order to copy the rightward lean, and this also feels perfectly natural -- if right-handed writers had chosen this instead originally, we may have a left-lean on our letters.

Using "LEN'TH" to abbreviate "LENGTH" is really hilarious (or I am fundamentally misunderstanding something). Why did they not adjust the tracking as in "PLUS" vs. "MINUS"? Maybe they already reached the minimum in "LEN'TH". Fun stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com