Maybe I'm being a curmudgeon, but I miss bitmapped fonts.
I use terminus wherever I can. It's exactly 12 pixels high (there are larger sizes, but they're not really useful). It's crisp, and clear, and easy to read, and looks excellent in Emacs.
There's no fancy font hinting or subpixel rendering. The font specifies exactly the pixels that it occupies, and that's it. If Emacs tries to render it at 11 or 13 pixels high, it doesn't -- it renders at exactly 12.
Some years back, firefox removed support for bitmapped fonts. So I had to set it to use terminus-ttf instead. This works fine in many places; the comments here in hacker news are being rendered at 12px so it looks pretty similar to the bitmapped font except with the addition of some subpixel rendering. It makes the edges of the letters soft and fuzzy but I would really prefer nice crisp, clean pixels. It's not too bad, though.
But in this comment box, firefox wants to render the text at 13.33px high, so it tries to upscale it a little bit and it looks muddy and terrible.
I guess things are different on a high-DPI display, but if you want to optimize the legibility of characters while minimizing their size, you really can't beat a bitmapped font where someone actually went and manually placed each and every pixel by hand.
I use terminus wherever I can. It's exactly 12 pixels high (there are larger sizes, but they're not really useful). It's crisp, and clear, and easy to read, and looks excellent in Emacs.
There's no fancy font hinting or subpixel rendering. The font specifies exactly the pixels that it occupies, and that's it. If Emacs tries to render it at 11 or 13 pixels high, it doesn't -- it renders at exactly 12.
Some years back, firefox removed support for bitmapped fonts. So I had to set it to use terminus-ttf instead. This works fine in many places; the comments here in hacker news are being rendered at 12px so it looks pretty similar to the bitmapped font except with the addition of some subpixel rendering. It makes the edges of the letters soft and fuzzy but I would really prefer nice crisp, clean pixels. It's not too bad, though.
But in this comment box, firefox wants to render the text at 13.33px high, so it tries to upscale it a little bit and it looks muddy and terrible.
I guess things are different on a high-DPI display, but if you want to optimize the legibility of characters while minimizing their size, you really can't beat a bitmapped font where someone actually went and manually placed each and every pixel by hand.