Oh no the „MAN“ is literally one pixel too low and now I can’t unsee it
TL;DR: what we’re dealing with is a font that tries to be inconsistent on purpose to give it an informal feel, but this bites us with some texts.
This text is a single text layer (obviously doing so for consistency)
so what we’re not dealing with is not editing failure, and instead something a bit more nastier.
Because the fonts are fairly detailed and we have to fit quite a lot of detail in a small area, usually anti-aliasing is done, because without it, we end up with something like this:
which results in these jagged lines which don’t look particularly appealing, and for smaller font sizes, readability is harmed significantly.
Photoshop in particular controls anti-aliasing method in this dropdown:
and my usual approach uses the “Smooth” method which from my experiments in an unrelated area (manga scanlation typesetting) happens to provide nice results, which is why I rarely bother changing it.
As we can see some pixels now go beyond the baseline in places where the font actually touches it. The effect was exacerbated because I added additional blur to match the text that was on the original image that I took the sign from.
Using the “Sharp” anti-aliasing method seems to strike a nice compromise, although we would have to see it zoomed out first.
And so we have the three extra images:
Smooth (basically the same as in the previous post, except I did not add an additional blur)
Sharp
None
…but the jump still seems to be visible, so this is not just anti-aliasing in effect, but there’s more, so I opened up High-Logic Font Creator and opened the font in question.
And we can see that the right-most side of letter “A” is significantly higher than the font baseline, and meanwhile
the left-most side “M” touches it at all points, the central part goes lower than the baseline, and the right-most side is slightly above it.
The distance combined with anti-aliasing woes is significant enough to register as one pixel difference, so what I’m gonna do is manually compensate for it, by moving the letter “M” and “N” slightly up.
(original)
(compensated, value picked experimentally)
I think it’s slightly better now, although at this point it’s hard for me to judge (been staring at it too hard).
I always reblog for someone caring too much about fonts. Welcome to my pain.
Fonts: the cause of and solution to all our life’s problems
ALT
