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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

I can appreciate all sorts of tech nostalgia, but reading the intro my first thought was "wow this is cognitively impairing me" and then "please don't". Achieving it is surely a feat, but the actual effect is to make it as hard now to use my computer as it was over 20 years ago, because the type is illegible.

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That's fair enough, i think it's a matter of taste, really. For me, it evokes a warm sense of nostalgia for a simpler time. Not that it necessarily was, and definitely not that it was better – i was a kid back then, so that has definitely coloured my memory of it all.

I see this more as a "just because we can" art project, than anything else.

EDIT: it also occurs to me that i have tons of respect for the hours of effort that would've gone into making fonts back then be beautiful at such small DPI. I think it's a good example of constraints producing interesting/good/impressive art. But i should avoid waxing too philosophical!

I have a ton of respect both for font design in any constraints and the reverse engineering effort required to produce old pixelated text in modern web browsers. But it still made it significantly harder for me to read, and I hope this isn’t something anyone will try to reproduce for real world use, because it’s not just a matter of taste at that point, it’s a matter of accessibility.

This is probably the God of "just because we can" art projects: https://www.windows93.net

This is a cool project but the end result doesn't really look like it does on real hardware

I found it interesting due to the amount of effort it took to produce an inaccurate and barely legible approximation, at least on my web browser. Then I dug around the Fontconfig documentation and tried a couple of things. Changing 'hintstyle' to 'hintfull' produced much better, albeit imperfect, results.

Why go to this effort? I find the sharpness and contrast of screen fonts much more readable than anti-aliased fonts, at least under ideal circumstances (e.g. the screen font supports a given font size at a given resolution). Unfortunately, those ideal circumstances are incredibly rare these days.

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