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Nokia’s legendary font makes for a great user interface font

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317 points rguiscard | 4 comments | 30 Aug 25 12:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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opan ◴[30 Aug 25 19:17 UTC] No.45077227[source]▶
I can never seem to tell fonts apart or appreciate them unless they're bitmap fonts. I love a sharp, crisp, clean font. I can tell apart Terminus, Tewi, and Lemon. Everything else just falls into a blurry "other" category, it seems, unless it's very highly stylized. I had high expectations opening this article and then was kinda like "Where's the font? Is he using it in those screenshots? Looks pretty normal".
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1. anikom15 ◴[30 Aug 25 20:51 UTC] No.45077898[source]▶
Blurry? Sounds like a poor renderer. You may want to turn anti-aliasing off. What OS are you on?
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2. zdimension ◴[30 Aug 25 23:22 UTC] No.45078888[source]▶
I think "blurry" was used here referring to the fact that they don't really pay attention to the differences between fonts, not to an aspect of the rendering.
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3. opan ◴[01 Sep 25 07:36 UTC] No.45090404[source]▶
It was kind of a double-meaning. Non-bitmap fonts really are blurry, comparatively. AFAICT the non-bitmap fonts just hide this thanks to people using HiDPI displays now, which is basically like saying "well, it looks fine from far away".
4. opan ◴[01 Sep 25 07:42 UTC] No.45090452[source]▶
I have never encountered a non-HiDPI setup where non-bitmap fonts looked especially different or good, so I don't think my OS[1] is relevant. If you look at screenshots of classic Mac OS it has a beautiful timeless look to the fonts, that I feel I similarly get using Terminus in my terminals. I also wanted to list an old Windows version out of fairness, which would be 3.1, I guess, but when quickly looking up screenshots, it doesn't look quite as good as I want it to. Your first instinct that my setup is wrong when I'm commenting on the state of fonts as a whole tells me you're probably used to the blur. Most people who aren't already a bit weird about their terminal fonts don't seem to understand or at least don't seem to care when I talk about the blurry font problem.

[1] But I'll tell you anyway so I don't seem like an asshole. I'm using Guix System GNU/Linux and the Sway Wayland compositor on my primary PC at the moment.