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Mononoki – A Font for Programming and Code Review

madmalik.github.io

61–70 of 129 posts

Re: Mononoki – A Font for Programming and Code Review

#62
post #59

Not that it matters, but I wonder where the name came from. It sounds Japanese (although the first part is obviously inspired by 'monospace'), but 'mononoki' isn't a Japanese word. There are many ways it could be interpreted as a combination of two words, though, or it could be a corruption of 'mononoke' (a spirit).

Maybe a plan on both "Mononoke" and "Monokai" (the other font)?

Re: Mononoki – A Font for Programming and Code Review

#63
post #52
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've considered doing just that, but it wouldn't be the right thing to do. I don't want to make money using something that technically isn't mine to use.

What's the technicality? Typefaces are exempt from copyright protection.

As @elcapitan said, licensing is the same as for software. Fonts are intellectual property (IP), just like most other intangible products of R&D. It is too bad, of course, and my usual opinion about IP applies. However, we don't live in an ideal world, and many of us are stuck following rules we don't agree with.

What I'd personally find more interesting is a first-principles research effort to find out what makes some fonts so much better than others. My gut tells me that such an effort might yield, as a side effect, a formal method for creating such fonts that are especially well suited for a specific purpose.

Re: Mononoki – A Font for Programming and Code Review

#64
From someting I prepared long ago, easily confused glyphs, depending on the typeface (if you aren't sure what one of the characters is ... perhaps try a different typeface?):

     * b69B80Oo
     * 1Il|
     * ij
     * 5S
     * 9gq
     * co
     * rn m
     * cl d
     * vv w
     * .,
     * :;
     * `'
     * ''"
     * ' and (curved/smart/curly single quotes)
     * " and (curved/smart/curly double quotes)
     * ~-
     * )]}
     * u and (mu)
     * v and (nu)
     * Capital vs. lowercase letters.
        wW
        xX
        zZ
        vV
        uU
        cC
        sS

Note that many of the above are easier to distinguish because they are next to each other and you are conciously examining them. You need to read your code and know a character is a colon and not a semicolon without even thinking about it.

Re: Mononoki – A Font for Programming and Code Review

#67
post #36

I've added it to the programming font comparison at http://s9w.io/font_compare/

Great resource. I could see how it might be useful to add a few filters - like for me, filter out fonts where captial-O and zero 0 look too similar (perhaps none, slashed, dotted -- as I frequently work in/with Norwegian, so the zero shouldn't really look to much like an Ø either...).

I'm sure there are other things that tend to annoy me, that are a matter of taste, but that's the first one that came to mind. Maybe some of them have poor differentiation between apostrophe/single-quote/back-tick?

[ed: See also: hackuser's comment above]

Re: Mononoki – A Font for Programming and Code Review

#69
post #36

I've added it to the programming font comparison at http://s9w.io/font_compare/

This is cool. Do you take request to add font to your site? If so, could you also add one of my favorite font Nanum Gothic to sw9w.io?(http://dev.naver.com/projects/nanumfont/download/). Although it is relatively unknown, I haven't found any programming font I like except this one.

Re: Mononoki – A Font for Programming and Code Review

#70
post #59

Not that it matters, but I wonder where the name came from. It sounds Japanese (although the first part is obviously inspired by 'monospace'), but 'mononoki' isn't a Japanese word. There are many ways it could be interpreted as a combination of two words, though, or it could be a corruption of 'mononoke' (a spirit).

It could be three words: mono no ki. Mono (as 物) is generally "thing," which doesn't really work, but we can assume it's being used as simply mono (in loan form, モノ), short for "monospace," here. No (の) is a particle indicating possession, and "ki" (as 気) is "spirit" or "essence" (with different kanji it could be quite a few other things; Japanese has a lot of homophones).

So I suppose we could translate the name to "the essence of monospace," if we were so inclined, and transliterate it back to Japanese as モノの気.

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