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DiabloD3today at 8:08 PM0 repliesview on HN

Something I never liked about this game is its showing it in your browser at your chosen font size.

Chrome (assuming you're using Chrome) draws it a specific way. This does not match how Freetype (using typical tuning) or DirectWrite draws it. Chrome's choices in font renderer tuning and blending makes it kind of split the difference between Windows-style and OSX-style, and isn't native to either.

What it should be doing is showing you lossless screenshots of actual in-app renders at different sizes. Some in Chrome (to represent the Electron apps), some in DirectWrite, some in OSX post-Retina, etc.

Some fonts look amazing at larger sizes, but are unreadable at smaller ones. Some perform exceptionally well at smaller sizes. Some look great on every font renderer but OSX's, but some only look right on OSX and look bad everywhere else.

I've sorta played this game with myself, in a semi-objective way: take a bunch of fonts, ignore the subjective art nature of them, and throw them at a bunch of common renderers and see what the optimal size is, and then sort by smallest legible size.

If we define Fira Code, the most popular code font out there, as the bare minimum, 8 of the ones I tested beat it, while 17 were worse.

https://github.com/Diablo-D3/dotfiles/blob/master/fontsizes....