KernType – A Kerning Game | Hacker News Reader

KernType – A Kerning Game

type.method.ac

134 pointskristianc36 comments

Your periodic reminder that bad kerning distracted Donald Knuth from TAOCP for a decade or so, setting our industry back countless person-millennia. Do not trifle with kerning. It’s a different kind of Turing tarpit for software engineers.

But how many person-millennia has it saved for all the people who don't need to be distracted by bad kerning now?

That's an excellent point. It sure beats having 1,000 smart people each spending 20 years independently solving the same problem.

Wow after all the bad kerning jokes I can't believe I didn't think of this. So well executed too, very addictive :)

Could 'juice'* it a little

(*) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

Should have been called Kemtype

Nice pun!

this is a nice keming machine

When I started using the internet, I would read pom as porn given the horrible font and terminal I was using. It made for some really awkward misunderstandings.

Google ReCAPTCHA, back when it was about OCR'ing books, has apparently made that mistake with pom.xml --- no surprise, I bet 99% of people who saw a CAPTCHA saying "pom" thought it said "porn".

I've had similar isseus with some sans-serif fonts and uppercase letters joining together to form another letter. This might not be the best example but you get the idea... https://i.imgur.com/v2A3m4z.png

Nice game. But I find it frustrating not to be able to drag the last character. My experience is that well-kerned text takes up overall less horizontal space than unkerned text (i.e. most kerning adjustments are negative), so I'm not sure why this game doesn't allow me to change that overall width.

It might just be an accommodation for people who know little about typography.

I couldn't have done it if I'd been able to adjust the overall length because I had no intuition about how close the characters should have been in the various fonts, I took my cue from the total width.

Consider that you're not starting from 'no kerning', but from deliberately bad kerning.

The overall width is a given because it tells you the tracking (letter-spacing) you're aiming for. It's common for this parameter to be user-selectable even when kerning is completely automatic (or to be automatically adjusted for the purpose of justification), so when you are the kerning algorithm, it's not your job to question that choice.

I can see how this can seem weird, as nominally you are responsible for deciding the overall width. But if you had to try to continue the tracking between the first two glyphs instead, or aim for e.g. "+20%", it would be much more difficult.

Being able to continuously deal with the feeling of "they want me to do WHAT!?" is one of the skills that distinguishes pro graphic designers from amateurs ;)

I only did 2 words. The first word I almost perfectly nailed it. Only got 80/100. Second word I was further off, got 88/100. I don't understand the scoring.

I think the scoring depends too much on word length. I consistently did better on longer words.

Great concept, fun game. Wish it was more mobile friendly.

Doesn't work in mobile Safari

It works great on iPad.

I’m on mobile safari as well. I can drag the letters, but I can’t click the “compare” burton.

I can't even drag the letters, or for that matter zoom out to see the cut off text below them

Because of the twitter link.

That's because Apple doesn't keep their shit up to date.

Doesn't work on Android Brave (Chromium 79) browser either.

If you try to drag, the whole page scrolls instead.

No luck for me on Chrome on a Pixel3a, either. I can select a character, but I can't move it.

Note that the site hosts a few other such games, which are all cool: https://method.ac

It's a good idea to complete it at least 1 time / year. Wish it had more challenges.

Author here. I’ve been meaning to release a second version of the game, will probably tackle it in 2020 (this game is around eight years old and needs a complete rewrite to work on mobile)

It works on Firefox Mobile on Android. However, one has to switch from landscape to portrait mode back and forth to kern, and then to click on the next button.

Not working at all in Chrome on my Pixel 2

Pretty fun. Very easy, but fun nonetheless.

How had I not seen this before?

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1015/

There's always a relevant xkcd...

Bazillionth time it’s posted and discussed. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=type.method.ac Not sure how HN even allows it.

Reposts on HN are fine if a story hasn't had significant attention in the last year or so. This has been the practice for many years here.

It's actually only the 6th time it's been discussed. Every other time it got 0 comments.

The most recent time it got any sort of traction was 4 years ago.

Seems reasonable for HN to allow that.

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