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Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

(martin.wojtczyk.de)
631 points wojtczyk | 2 comments | 31 Aug 24 04:29 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ntrcessor ◴[31 Aug 24 05:29 UTC] No.41406748[source]▶
If I recall correctly, that is a kerning issue with the font. At the edges of the font is not a solid line, but rather more like every other pixel so that the characters can be closer together. This causes the up/down movement of one character to the next, as they fit together like poorly made puzzle pieces. And just how bad it looks depends on the size of the pixel on the monitor, and how much "bleed" it has with it's neighbors. (I don't recall the tech terms for this.)
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teo_zero ◴[31 Aug 24 05:41 UTC] No.41406784[source]▶
Isn't kerning about left-right and not up-down, though?
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jfoutz ◴[31 Aug 24 05:59 UTC] No.41406842[source]▶
I think ascents and descents fall under keming. You don’t want a j to bump into a b on the next line. So you have short letters from time to time. But that might be an archaic usage, or I’m wrong.
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1. isametry ◴[31 Aug 24 07:36 UTC] No.41407151[source]▶
You mean another, more compact version of `j` with a shorter descender? Well that’s called an alternate glyph.

Kerning is strictly about the relative spacing between two adjacent glyphs. The only case that would ever be vertical is if you’re writing vertical lines (such as in Chinese or Japanese).

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2. johnwalkr ◴[31 Aug 24 08:51 UTC] No.41407436[source]▶
Interesting... I'm in Japan and I was about to reply that Chinese and Japanese are almost always fixed-width, but luckily I grabbed a product next to me (laundry detergent) covered in Japanese. I was expecting to see perfect line-up of characters on adjacent lines proving they are fixed-width. They aren't even close, and this is true for both vertical and horizontal text on everything I look at. I opened a few apps like word and confirmed by default everything is fixed-width. So TIL Japanese is fixed width for plebs but any professional copy has way more kerning that I realised.