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Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

I've been seeing these all my life and for some reason never thought to ask if anyone else noticed them. I never found them particularly distracting and didn't know they were a sign of bad typography. Still, cool to see an article about them.

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If you start to study typography at a relatively deep level, there will be two things that will absolutely kill you on a daily basis. One is rivers. The second is bad kerning on signs/displays.

Yeah bad keming is a real problem

Note to myself: Don't study typography.

Also do not visit the Wikipedia page on kerning. It taught me to recognise bad kerning :(

Not stuff like this? http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4047502122/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/6836803380/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4047501878/

Not a font-nerd but I'll bite. Is the 'N' in MADISON and SECOND upside down? (but correct in http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4046758633/)

You are correct. It drives me nuts when I walk around Second and Madison in Seattle; I would assume the workers were trolling when they did it, but I have pointed it out to plenty of co-workers that didn't see a problem.

> The second is bad kerning on signs/displays.

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1015/.

Same here. Did you tend to notice them out the corner of hour eye more than straight-on?

I think the vision mode that detects rivers is more of a "big-picture, perhriphery" type where the vision mode that you use for for reading is a focused, small area type. I think you will always catch them in the big picture, but may not notice when reading.

The peripheral vision is also blurry.

Rivers stand out more in blurred text, even in central vision.

Definitely. People typesetting books are supposed to get rid of them but it's a manual process. As I've written in another comment I'd typically "blur" my vision a bit and quickly scan all the pages of the book to track these down (on screen) and then remove them. Don't know what was the technique of other typesetters when it came down to finding these.

Some proofreaders would note them should they find / notice any but some wouldn't.

Now that I think of it, using OP's findings it would probably wouldn't really be too hard to write a "plugin" taking screenshots of Quark XPress / Adobe InDesign / LaTeX preview and showing "rivers" in a HUD on top of the screen-rendered pages. This would make chasing "rivers" quite easy.

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