Sessions

Please Your Pixel-Hungry Eyes With Codes That Read Better

*
Accepted Session
Hacks
Long form
osb2009-0183
Scheduled: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 from 1:45 – 3:30pm in Morrison
Session notes

Excerpt

Make the text you see in the Terminal window more legible and readable by finding, customizing and designing your own font!

Description

If we spent most of our workday staring at the Terminal window, then it’s probably worth to make the letters you see in that window more legible, and the text more readable. This session will introduce you to:

  • Readily available font alternatives you can try
  • Tips and tricks for better onscreen legibility (do you know that white-on-black type is less legible than black-on-white, or that most fonts can easily be made more readable by tweaking the line spacing? What about anti-aliasing?)
  • Tools to design pixel-based fonts and customize existing fonts (like gbdfed)
  • Practical tips to drawing and completing your font character set (how should an ‘A’ look?)
  • And, if you’re feeling ambitious, tools to design your own font from scratch (with tools like FontForge

Bring your own laptop and prepare questions you always wanted to ask (but never could) about typography and how text are displayed. You’ll get out of this session with a programming font you can call your own.

Tags

font, typeface, typography, terminal, type design, anti alias, pixel

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