This was the back of Mum’s 1985 tax assessment slip from the IRD. Helvetica, in metal. The bold looks a bit narrow: a condensed cut, or just a compromised version because of the machinery used? Not often seen, since by this time phototypesetting was the norm, though one reason Car magazine was a good […]
Tag: typography
From my desk, 1986
Before this gets recycled, I thought I’d scan it as a memento: a 1986 printout off our Riteman dot matrix printer (which I still have, with spare cartridges), hooked up to a Commodore 64. I forget the printer interface. The image isn’t mine: I only imagine that 14-year-old me was claiming copyright over the layout […]
How to delete Windows 10 system fonts for real, not just remove registry references to them
My last post implied that I ego-surfed and found a Wikipedia chat entry about me, but that’s not the case. I was searching for information on how to remove a system-protected font from Windows 10, and seeing as I often post solutions to obscure technical issues on here, I had hoped I recorded my how-to […]
When not having something drives creativity
I hadn’t expected this reply Tweet to get so many likes, probably a record for me. I knew my parents couldn’t afford The Lettering Book, so I went without, which forced me to create my own typeface designs. Later I became the first digital typeface designer in this country. — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) July […]
Fixed Vivaldi’s poor type display, thanks to wmjordan
It took two months but I finally got there. Vivaldi now displays type normally though the browser interface is slightly messed up. But I’ll take good type display, thanks. On the MacType forums, a user in China called wmjordan was in the same boat but had found a solution. In their words: For […]
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Directwrite isn’t the culprit
That was confusing. Yesterday’s blog post was representative of my thinking: given that certain people were upset when Chromium took away the Directwrite toggle in 2016, and type rendering on Chromium-based Vivaldi deteriorated significantly for me with v. 2.10 (it turns out v. 2.9 was the turning-point), then did Chromium only switch fully to Directwrite […]
Has Directwrite arrived on my Chromium-based browsers four years after everyone else?
After considerable searching, the bug that I reported to Vivaldi, and which they cannot reproduce, appears to be one that the general public encountered back in 2016, when Chromium took away the option to disable its Directwrite rendering. I don’t know why I’ve only encountered it in 2020, and as far as I can tell, […]
Returning to Firefox?
I wonder if it’s time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefox’s and Opera GX’s text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldi’s tech people haven’t been able to replicate my bug). There’s […]
Sticking with 24 inches, but going to QHD: a pleasant upgrade
The Dell P2418D: just like the one I’m looking at as I type, but there are way more wires coming out of the thing in real life Other than at the beginning of my personal computing experience (the early 1980s, and that’s not counting video game consoles), I’ve tended to have a screen that’s […]
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Switching to Opera GX from Vivaldi: I needed the better type rendering
Surprisingly, Vivaldi hadn’t notified me of any updates for months—I was on v. 2.05, and had no idea that they were up to 2.10. Having upgraded manually, I noticed its handling of type had deteriorated. Here is one paragraph in Lucire: My font settings had also changed. Coincidentally, I downloaded Opera GX last […]
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