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bravura04/24/20252 repliesview on HN

I usually like your takes, but where I disagree today is when you say: "Truffles have a functional role in a dish." but fonts don't.

Either both do have functional roles or both are luxuries like Hermès.


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tptacek04/24/2025

I don't want to get too deep into this because it doesn't matter to my point (you're also not entitled to eat truffled dishes any more than you're entitled to eat ortolans). But: set a document in one text face or another; it won't much matter at all to the experience of reading it (unless you pick a bad text face). Leave the truffle out of a risotto and you've made a different dish.

The important subtext of this thread is that, when we're talking about functional typesetting, the solutions space is pretty constrained. There aren't that many things you can do with a text face (vs. a display face). And you already have available to you extremely high-quality, well-hinted text faces at a full range of weights.

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