Show HN: Sankei, one of the largest Japanese newspapers, uses a pixelized font | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sankei, one of the largest Japanese newspapers, uses a pixelized font

sankei.com

2 points7moritz78 comments

Across the whole site, but only for paragraphs as opposed to titles. This is so odd, does someone have an explanation for that? To me it seems to negatively influence readability.

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No, they don't. Everything looks normal and "vectoresque", here.

What device are you using? I'm viewing this on an 1440p monitor and it 100% is pixelized. Might be a bug then with scaling

https://ibb.co/BqD9GmX

The site renders perfectly in Chrome, Firefox and Safari on a MacBook Pro M1 and, FWIW, also in Chrome on a Samsung A53. The problem is definitely on _your_ side.

Oddly this is the only site I've ever noticed it on so I do doubt it.

“Show HN” is for something you made and want people to try. This should’ve been an “Ask HN”.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

I see no font pixelation on that page. Judging by the other comment saying the same, the issue appears to lie somewhere on your end.

Maybe one should encourage OP to turn this into an actual "Show HN" by uploading screenshots and the browser's devtools open on the computed style tab, scrolling all the way down where they display the actual font(s) used to render the element in question. In my case that turns out to be TakaoPGothic, which is not found in the respective style rule (apparently chosen by the OS then).

The sad state of affairs is that at a point where it matters most—displaying intricate, somewhat region-sensitive CJK glyphs—the technology to do so necessitates downloading comparably big files. IOW if my content is in English and I want a fancy font, small file and if it fails, well, you still can correctly read [a-zA-Z]. But if I do the same in Chinese or Japanese, tough luck, except I put in a lot of work to build an optimized font for the content du jour, else it will be easily 10MB for one font alone.

MacOS and Android both handle this flawlessly out of the box, though. They don't require any additional download and the website in question doesn't even use webfonts anyway.

PEBKAC, as always.

Where Android doesn't or at least didn't when I last checked (years ago) is CJK beyond U+xffff (CJK ext B and beyond). You can't just install fonts on Android as a user so web pages that need to display some of those characters (a minority of which is not extremely rare) do need to include a webfont. The same goes for cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Not mainstream concerns but still.

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