from Hacker News

Pope Francis' Simple Tomb Marred by 'Awful' Letter Spacing

by danielam on 5/7/25, 2:29 PM with 8 comments

• by PaulHoule on 5/7/25, 2:41 PM

  A few years back I got interested in printing stuff and noticed that common tools (Word, Powerpoint, Illustrator, ...) get horrible results setting serifed fonts in large sizes. I figured out how to kern manually, but boy is it a hassle.

  When I look at large numbers of posters printed by various organizations I find that people today hardly ever use serifed fonts to set titles and I think this is why.

  The thing is I don't remember this being a problem with desktop publishing in the 1990s or the early 2000s (though then I was setting titles for a political organization with a novelty font that looked like the font used by Die Grünen.) I'm wondering if I was less picky then or if there has really been a regression, such as a patent troll outlawing good kerning.

  I thought pretty seriously though about making my own kerning tables for a font I liked because you only need one for a system.

• by beardyw on 5/7/25, 4:26 PM

  No, it is just that the letters have equal spaces between them. It is not what we are accustomed to, but it is not wrong. It is a piece of art. Art is what it is, it can't be wrong. Get used to it.

• by duxup on 5/7/25, 2:33 PM

  This whole thing / articles surrounding it seem like someone desperate to talk about their industry and imposing a "controversy" on other news ...

• by bediger4000 on 5/7/25, 2:57 PM

  I've heard it suggested this was done on purpose to spite Pope Francis.