The lower-case 'd' in Courier Prime - odd?

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  • The lower-case 'd' in Courier Prime - odd?

    To my eye, the lower-case "d" in Courier Prime looks weird because - at least on my Windows 7 machine, and whether in FD or MS Word - the o part of the d is smaller/shorter than the o part of b or g or simply o. In some ways, the d looks like a badly-rendered character.

    Anyone else notice this?

    Also, if you use Courier Prime on a Mac, is the d different like that on your machine?

    I know John August uses Mac, and so I'm wondering if (somehow) the d on the Mac looks normal - IOW, it may just be a Windows thing.
    _____

    Overall, I'm really liking Courier Prime.

    At first, I did not like the italics - because it doesn't look like Courier Prime italicized; rather, it looks like a different font. (For example, the italicized f.) But then I realized that, for the limited times when I do want italics in a script, the more-different look of it is a good thing. To my eye, anyway.

  • #2
    Re: the lower-case 'd' in Courier Prime - odd?

    I use a Macbook, and the d looks fine to me in the default text editor. I switched to MMS, and it looked normal in it as well. Hope this helps!

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    • #3
      Re: the lower-case 'd' in Courier Prime - odd?

      Originally posted by tutty View Post
      I use a Macbook, and the d looks fine to me in the default text editor. I switched to MMS, and it looked normal in it as well. Hope this helps!
      Thanks.

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      • #4
        Re: The lower-case 'd' in Courier Prime - odd?

        Basically Windows font rendering is terrible. Well, at least if you're me, you think that.

        Here's a quick summary of the problem. (I'm no expert in computer typography, but having written a typographically intensive application and custom text layout engine on the three major platforms - Windows, Mac, and Linux - I've at least run up against a lot of the issues involved.)

        Almost all fonts these days are "vector". To oversimplify, they're basically a set of instructions saying, for each glyph: draw a line, then a curve, then another line, etc., with additional information about thickness, spacing, and other metrics. Your computer monitor, however, is not vector: it's a fixed grid of pixels, or what's called "raster". In order to render a font glyph, the system has to figure out which pixels to draw. That makes things tricky for curves, or for lines that are positioned "between" pixels on the grid. Think of the problem of trying to draw a smooth circle using a square grid.

        And that's where the difference comes in.

        OS X does a lot more in terms of ensuring that the shape of the font is displayed as intended regardless of the pixel grid. It does this by combining multiple pixels with various shadings to create the effect of a single pixel. Now that single "virtual" pixel, positioned in between the fixed pixels of the monitor's pixel grid, might end up being quite a bit blurrier than an "actual" pixel. More than a few non-Mac users have noted that they don't like OS X's font rendering because it looks blurry to them.

        Windows, on the other hand, hammers the main lines of a font to fit the pixel grid. (It still uses a form of shading to anti-alias curves, etc.) Since the pixel grid for a given glyph will change depending on the font size, that means the actual shape of the letter as rendered on your monitor can vary significantly as font size changes. Some people like that better: Windows fonts tend to appear sharper since they stick to "actual" pixels, but uglier - at least in the eyes of the typographically sensitive like me - because glyph shapes are distorted, sometimes badly.

        My presumption is that what you're seeing is only a monitor problem. If you print it out on paper it'll probably look fine (because that pixel grid is hundreds of DPI instead of dozens). Also it'll probably look fine if you export to PDF and open it in, say, Adobe Reader, since Adobe Reader uses its own font render and not the Windows system one.

        Here's a pretty thorough look at text rasterization and why it's sometimes/often/always imperfect: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization

        A lot of this should start to go away now that XP has been officially EOL'd. As of Vista, there is a better font rendering methodology available. But it will take a long time for things to fully migrate, and even then there are still issues (http://www.mathies.com/weblog/?p=908).

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        • #5
          Re: The lower-case 'd' in Courier Prime - odd?

          Originally posted by Fade In Pro View Post
          My presumption is that what you're seeing is only a monitor problem. If you print it out on paper it'll probably look fine (because that pixel grid is hundreds of DPI instead of dozens). Also it'll probably look fine if you export to PDF and open it in, say, Adobe Reader, since Adobe Reader uses its own font render and not the Windows system one.
          Thanks for all the details. But, nope. I also see it when printed.

          For example, I have a printout in front of me now with the word "grader". The top of the circle-part of "d" is noticeably lower than the tops of the "a" and the "e". While in other words, the letter "b" looks fine/normal.

          I also see it in pdf. And with some on-screen magnifications, it looks really, really bad. At other magnifications, it just looks off.

          Maybe when John August was a kid, the letter "d" attacked him in a dream. So now, this is his payback - deprecation.

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          • #6
            Re: The lower-case 'd' in Courier Prime - odd?

            Well, if there's one thing I've learned about debugging it's not to rule anything out.

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            • #7
              Re: The lower-case 'd' in Courier Prime - odd?

              More seriously: huh. That's not what I expected. (I'm not in front of a Windows machine but have certainly run into the sort of thing you're talking about, for — I'm pretty sure — the reasons I awkwardly described.)

              The only other thing I can think of is that Windows and OS X do autohinting differently. "Hinting" is the addition of information to enable accurate rendering at various sizes, but both Windows and OS X do (for the most part, I think) their own automatic analysis of glyph shapes to determine just what it is they're trying to draw and how to best draw it at the specified size.

              If a given glyph shape (or part of a shape) is right on a certain threshold, it's certainly possible that different font renderers would draw the letter differently. In that case, yeah, it's probably worth contacting Quote Unquote Apps to see if they're aware, and if it's possible to tweak the glyph shape slightly to render properly on both OSes.

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