googlefonts / atkinson-hyperlegible

SIL Open Font License 1.1
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Letter sequence "rli" unclear, interpreted as "rti"? #18

Open jimcheetham opened 1 year ago

jimcheetham commented 1 year ago

I've forced one of my browsers to use Atkinson Hyperlegible for serif & sans-serif font choices, and to override all external fonts. Sometimes this causes problems :-) but most of the time it's fantastic.

However, I've noticed recently that I can often confuse the sequence "rli" with "rti" - even though the 't' wouldn't make any sense. There's just something about the serif on the i and the way it interacts with the r, which leads me to see a bar on the l that isn't there.

More common in small bold text, like image captions and so on. Today's trigger was the name "Charlie" in a photo caption, which on first glance was read as the slightly nonsensical "Chartie". I looked at the page source for that caption (https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/historic-perth-society-high-constables-13344568), and they'd specified "font-size: 14px; font-weight: 700; color: #2c2c2c;", and also "letter-spacing: -0.07px;", which probably contributed.

However I've noticed (but not recorded the circumstances) this confusion before, so it probably isn't all to be blamed on the tight letter-spacing in this case ...