> I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters, where a handwriting or printing typeface (or "Ransom" :) could vary the letter "a" so all the "a"'s don't look alike, the same as happens irl.
Why would you want that? It seems like it would be harder to read for no benefit.
call me OCD but when I look at stuff written in script my eyes check to see if all the a's are the same, all the b's are the same, all the... and then what I see is manufactured uniformity, a communique from The Machine.
it wouldn't take much variation (say, three different a's) to make me feel a sense of relief that it's warmer and cuddlier
You might want it for emulating handwriting by choosing glyphs from a series of fonts so that tokens like "IEEE" or "error" aren't uncanny giveaways of the computer-rendering.
Why would you want that? It seems like it would be harder to read for no benefit.