Playing with Georgia

Headings like the following:

    4. Keep the measure honest
    The knobs that matter

Very AI, and irritating.

Counterpoint: stretching fonts is commonly regarded as a typographic sin, and a condensed form of Georgia exists: https://carterandcone.com/font/georgia/

Was the prompt to write a blog post about Georgia, or was the prompt just about a typeface and Georgia was Claude's pick?

> Georgia is a timeless typeface that comes free on almost every computer.

Just not Windows 3.1–98/NT, Classic Mac OS, or Free Software operating systems whose users have not installed the relevant package and accepted its license :)

https://web.archive.org/web/19990421072704/http://www.micros...

https://www.freshports.org/x11-fonts/webfonts/

I never liked it that much. Yes, it came with WinXP and used it in my physics reports when I had no idea about LaTeX trying to emulate the Computer Modern look of them, but when I learned some LaTeX found out you could use a font that became one my favorite serif fonts ever, Cambria. I still use it from time to time with ConTeXt.

It is odd to see a blog post that cares so much about typography and yet uses a pair of hyphens in place of an em-dash.

Interesting idea though. The title examples feel a lot like Apple Garamond from the turn of the century, Think different etc.

The proliferation of AI generate posts annoys me for two reasons:

1. It takes quite some entitlement to expect people to use of their own brain time for something you couldn't be bothered with

2. Even though SOTA LLM don't hallucinate as much anymore, they still produce low quality content:

  - Georgia's letters are already tall, that's literally what it was designed for. Stretching it taller fixes nothing and the stretch trick is broken anyway: the text gets bigger but the space it's given doesn't, so it spills onto whatever's underneath

  - a bunch of those "easy wins" do nothing at all, and one of them makes the text thinner right after the post tells you to make it thicker.

  - it never mentions Georgia's weird numbers. They dip below the line and never line up in a column. That's a big issue

OT, but something I didn’t know is that if you go to Google, and type in “$FOO font”, it will render the entire results page in that font.

Of course I had to try Comic Sans, then Georgia, and I was only a little disappointed when it didn’t work for Wingdings.

I was on board until “fake a medium weight”… faux bold is one of my pet peeves. How hard would it be to turn Georgia into a true variable axis font?

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