Re: Font selection algorithm / how do fonts work / what do you suggest for mono font?

[Yuri Khan]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 10:00 PM, Oleksandr Gavenko <gavenkoa@gmail.com> wrote:

> Internet full of suggestion about font selection for programmers […]
>
> Most today recommendations end with vector fonts which is blurry and too bold
> to me.
>
> My current display has 95 DPI.

At 95 DPI, basically, you have a choice: either some amount of
blurriness, or some amount of corrupting the intended letter shape.
The knob is called hinting. Choose aggressive (“full”) hinting,
strokes are pulled to integer pixel coordinates, you get crisp ugly
letters. Choose slight hinting, letter shape is preserved as much as
practical, but some strokes will be at fractional coordinates and thus
blurry.

On a typical landscape-oriented monitor, vertical strokes can benefit
from subpixel hinting, although some call the result “rainbow soap”.

Both problems (blurriness and letter misshaping) pretty much disappear
at 2x pixel density or around 192 DPI. (However a new one appears —
you start to hate bitmap graphics, as it is either too blurry or too
small.)