Re: [dev] ideas on suckless file manager

On Thu 09 Jun 2011 02:50:53 PM PDT, hiro wrote:
> The Tamsyn guy says it's an "aliased font". What does it mean?

Here's a reply from the author of Tamsyn regarding this matter:

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:04:43 -0700
From: Scott Fial <scott_AT_fial.com>
To: "Suraj N. Kurapati" <sunaku_AT_gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Tamsyn font - aliased or smoothed?

Hi Suraj,

Now that I'm done I realize that I've written more than this subject
probably deserves, but its close to my heart so bear with me.

To be honest, I'm no expert in fonts or the terminology. I'm just
some guy and somehow this font became my hobby. It seems the words
"aliased" and "anti-aliased" have meaning beyond my simplistic
interpretation. I naively used the term "aliased" to mean: not
anti-aliased, hinted, or smoothed in any way. But that's because I
vaguely equate "anti-aliasing" with the blurring and blending of a
font to smooth the jagged edges. And if that's the case, then the
jagged edges must be the "aliasing" (right?) since the true curves
and angles of each character can't be represented perfectly as
pixels. Such was my logic. Its a vector font in my mind; I have a
mental picture of the true shape of each character, but I'm faced
with aliasing effects as I try to represent that shape as pixels.
The fun comes in finding designs which look nice given that
constraint while avoiding as much of the resulting visual "static"
as possible.

The point I'm trying to make on the web page is that the font will
look the same wherever you use it and has no dependency on
sophisticated font rendering technologies. So, given all that I've
said here, what *is* the term I should be using to describe this
kind of font? I want the web page to be correct. Please put it to
your forum and let me know if anyone has the answer.

thanks,

Scott

On 6/9/2011 9:07 AM, Suraj N. Kurapati wrote:
> Hello,
>
> There has been some discussion on whether Tamsyn is "aliased"
> here:
>
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.misc.suckless/6178
>
> I thought you'd like to comment on this to clarify your
> definition, or perhaps revise your description on the Tamsyn
> homepage accordingly.
>
> Cheers.
>
> P.S. Many thanks for Tamsyn: it's the best monospaced font ever! :-)

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