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Go fonts

blog.golang.org

141–150 of 182 posts

Re: Go fonts

#141

Nice. it looks interesting. Do i need it? don't know. Will it be useful? might be. I don't see any reason to complain. It's a completely free font people. I see no downsides to this.

Exactly. On some other forums people complain like someone is forcing them to use it! I don't understand it at all. How does it affect their life in any way?

Don't like it? Don't need it? Move on with your life...

Re: Go fonts

#142

Is it just me, or is every other font produced by Bigalow and Holmes essentially Lucida?

This is much closer to Luxi (especially the monospace font) than to Lucida.

Re: Go fonts

#143
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pity when newer typefaces don't have lighter weights — they look far better on high resolution displays than normal/regular weights, which look almost bold. My favourite example and what I use daily, Office Code Pro Light: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sjrmanning/darkokai/screen...

This is MacOS font rendering for you, in Linux normal weight looks normal

Or rather, in macOS it looks normal and in Linux it looks too thin.

Re: Go fonts

#144

The page itself is set in the proportional version of Go. I found it distracting to read because of the uneven character widths. The majority of the characters (like 'b', 'd', 'f', 'k', 'l', 'o', and 't') are narrow, but some common letters (mainly the 'e' and 'c') are round and wide, with generous space around them. I can't get past the impression that I'm reading paper that wrinkled when it went through the printer…

The monospaced font looks very old, I don't like the look of it. The proportional one is ok but it can't be used for programming. In part because of the reasons you gave but especially because there is almost no gap between the two = characters in == and @ is almost superscripted, which looks wierd. I'm going back to Sans Regular (whatever it is on Ubuntu). It has its own problems (I and l look the same) but it's sti…

Yes! You put your finger on it -- it looks old!

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of "old" you could call it "retro". But it definitely reminds me of the formatting of K&R, which makes sense as the Go team see themselves as the heirs of the K&R tradition.

Re: Go fonts

#145
post #81

This reminds me of Java applications that you can immediately tell are Java because of the weird font. I don't see an advantage over using native system fonts. As far as I know you don't need a license to use fonts installed on the system running the application. Why does the font need to be bundled? The wide spread adoption of this is going to make go programs stick out like a sore thumb.

> I don't see an advantage over using native system fonts As touched on in the article, you need a standardized font you have control over for automated testing, to make sure you're getting reproducible results. OS fonts are too inconsistent for that. Now, why they couldn't use any of the literally hundreds of other open-source fonts instead that Google made…

That was one of my first thoughts.... imho Noto looks better, and the monospace font is pretty hideous imho. I like Inconsolata/Consolas, but there are many other options that are libre licensed and better looking imho.

As to other comments, mostly agreed on using system fonts.

Re: Go fonts

#146

Yuck, the monospace font feels too dense, and dislike the serifs.

I love serifs and haven't found a good monospaced serif font yet. This one looks good but has some minor bugs like spacing and * not being centered vertically for the times you write OCaml or C comments. I'm trying it out anyway because I've been missing serifs in my terminal and editor for too long.

Re: Go fonts

#147
post #13

"The experimental user interface toolkit being built at golang.org/x/exp/shiny includes several text elements, but there is a problem with testing them: What font should be used?" I am really amused by this opening. I guess it is part of the culture to "recreate" something unnecessary and perhaps better when there is resource to spare.

Font licensing is complicated and Chuck is a friend. It was very important to us that Go programmers be unencumbered when distributing programs that use this font.

What's wrong with Noto or Open-Sans? Or for that matter Inconsolata?

The Go fonts just don't look very good at all imho.

Re: Go fonts

#148
post #82
post #71

I'm surprised that people haven't commented on the implicit story here: the intention to deliver the "Shiny" cross-platform graphical toolkit for Go. If that happens, Go becomes one of the very few programming languages with a default cross-platform UI library.

Let's hope it won't be as ugly as the Java crap. Or Tk.

If you consider that many gui apps are written with HTML right now, I wouldn't worry about the looks of the toolkit as much, as long as it integrates and behaves as expected in X and Wayland and Windows and macOS and iOS and Android. That's more important than a skin, although I know many users prefer their platform's "native look", but what's native anyway, with mobile apps and web apps styling in many different ways. Even native Windows and macOS apps, which has a native look and feel, these days prefer to use a custom style, with most of the time following the design of vast empty white spaces and large controls, assuming everybody uses a 4k display.

What I'm trying to say is, if this comes out of the box and works reliably, then it'll attract more developers given the other ease of deployment aspects of Go.

Re: Go fonts

#149
post #79
post #71

I'm surprised that people haven't commented on the implicit story here: the intention to deliver the "Shiny" cross-platform graphical toolkit for Go. If that happens, Go becomes one of the very few programming languages with a default cross-platform UI library.

I hope not with that font. It looks amateurish.

The font appears to be a refined version of Luxi Sans, which in turn is a refined version of Lucida Grande, which had been OS X's system font for 1.5 decades. Personally, I probably wouldn't call Bigelow and Holmes amateurs.

Re: Go fonts

#150
post #81

This reminds me of Java applications that you can immediately tell are Java because of the weird font. I don't see an advantage over using native system fonts. As far as I know you don't need a license to use fonts installed on the system running the application. Why does the font need to be bundled? The wide spread adoption of this is going to make go programs stick out like a sore thumb.

> I don't see an advantage over using native system fonts As touched on in the article, you need a standardized font you have control over for automated testing, to make sure you're getting reproducible results. OS fonts are too inconsistent for that. Now, why they couldn't use any of the literally hundreds of other open-source fonts instead that Google made…

> As touched on in the article, you need a standardized font you have control over for automated testing

Why? Just standardize the font when running in test mode. I expect system applications to use my system fonts.

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