I think Mensch is missing: https://robey.lag.net/2010/06/21/mensch-font.html
I think it too!
Programming Fonts – Test Drive
261–270 of 289 posts
Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter? Context doesn't come into play? I mean - I can understand such confusion if you are dealing with some kind of multi-character random code or such (ie - a "confirmation code" for instance), and the site is primarily targeted to Danish or Norwegian users; in that case, the confusion would be valid. Much like such codes in "Englis…
> So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter? Yes. Once you become really fluent in a different script, I find that misuse of it starts to become really annoying. Before I had any proficiency in a language using the Cyrillic alphabet, if someone replaced say an A with a De (Д) or a W with a Sha (Ш) in an English text, I'd have no trouble reading it. Now, this kind of thi…
Or for that matter, Greek.
It absolutely drives me up the wall when I see uppercase lambdas used for A.
For example, the car company Kia styles their name KIΛ, which makes me think "Kil". Or the monitor company AOC writing it ΛOC.
And recently I've been watching an anime called Aldnoah.Zero, which stylizes its name as ΛLDNOΛH.ZERO. That one is particularly aggravating because the lambda is right next to an L!
Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive
#263It would be nice to see some Unicode things in the example, like arrows, various math symbols, etc. I am looking for a good programming font with the support of math symbols.
Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive
#264It drives me crazy when fonts look at the old convention of "strike through zero" and for some reason decides they need to be different from the convention and allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle. "Anka/Coder" in the linked article is guilty of this. When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centur…
need to be different from the convention and allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle
For what it's worth, the first machines I ever did any work with had the zero with the slash through it. That's because the output was to a teletype which printed the letter O, then went back a space and punched a / on top of it. They also used a capital P for a question mark.
Some printouts were horrific to read because a blank space was represented by a "b" with a / through it, not an underscore.
So I think that for computing the 0 with a slash extending outside the line predates the 0 with the slash entirely inside the line.
I'm not sure when or why the 0 with a dot in the middle became a thing. I first noticed it around 1989 on cheap (for the time) VGA cards.
Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter? Yes. Once you become really fluent in a different script, I find that misuse of it starts to become really annoying. Before I had any proficiency in a language using the Cyrillic alphabet, if someone replaced say an A with a De (Д) or a W with a Sha (Ш) in an English text, I'd have no trouble reading it. Now, this kind of thi…
Or for that matter, Greek. It absolutely drives me up the wall when I see uppercase lambdas used for A. For example, the car company Kia styles their name KIΛ, which makes me think "Kil". Or the monitor company AOC writing it ΛOC. And recently I've been watching an anime called Aldnoah.Zero , which stylizes its name as ΛLDNOΛH.ZERO. That one is particularly aggravating because the lambda is right next to an L!
ΛOC is the worst for me in Cyrillic, because that is a real word and it means elk.
Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive
#266One of my favorites is PragmataPro [0] (with powerline glyphs) and I'm sad it's not there. I guess they can't use proprietary fonts. PragmataPro was so weird when I started using it but it has grown on me and now I have a hard time switching to a terminal that uses something else. In any case, if you're like me and you look at the terminal screen for hours on end every single day, find some font that won't tire your…
All those ligatures for , =, etc. annoy me to no end. Ew.
Modern languages should simply support the actual characters, e.g. ≤ ≠ ≥ ← → etc.
Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive
#267I use a very simple test to verify if fonts are usable in programmer/technical environments: - check the readability of lower and upper case "i" (india) against the number "1" (one)and the lower and upper case "l" (lima). - Check the readability of the lower and upper case "o" (oscar) against the number "0". - check if the font can be used monospaced with being reasonable to good readability. If it passes those check…
- how much code can one fit on a screen, still maximum legibiilty? - Is there a lighter weight variant from which one can steal ()[]{} ? Essential for Lisp programming, nice for every language. My current winner is Roboto Mono Regular, with brackets borrowed from Roboto Mono Light. The font disappears on me (attitude takes bandwidth) and one would never know I played with the brackets till one goes back to another fo…
Very interesting. I've never heard of this idea of making some specific glyphs thinner, but it makes perfect sense. I'm curious, is this something you discovered on your own?
I'm definitely going to try this out.
Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I switched from using devavu for years finally to iosevka
Had a look at iosevka - it definitely seems nicer than many of the others, but it still feels too vertical when compared to DejaVu in my opinion. Is there something that sold you on it?
I've also switched to iosevka after many years of dejavu sans mono. I really like the brackets of iosevka, and its italics. I also appreciate the customisability of it, and the fact that the font itself is in some ways built rather like Computer Modern via METAFONT (and that it uses a Lisp-like language to do so).
Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Naive Danish speaker here. It is really jarring to look at, and is completely indistinguishable from ø. It is not that I cannot infer its meaning from the context, but it just stands out as a typo on first look and is really distracting. It surely would prevent me from using the font.
Good thing Danish doesn't have A through F, or you wouldn't be able to stomach hexadecimal.] Likewise with O; the commonplace zero with no slash would likely look like a jarring typo also, if Danish had that letter.
Not the same thing; A-F are expected in hexadecimal and thus don't look out of place. I don't understand what you mean with O, font designers usually make sure that there are visual cues specifically to make it easy to distinguish those two glyphs.
Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive
#270It drives me crazy when fonts look at the old convention of "strike through zero" and for some reason decides they need to be different from the convention and allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle. "Anka/Coder" in the linked article is guilty of this. When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centur…
Personally I'm a fan of the dotted zero since it looks clean and doesn't get confused with an O or an Ø. I guess it could get confused with a theta but how often does that show up in variable names?
Input (Sans or Mono) lets you customize your own font, with slashed or dotted zero, when you download: http://input.fontbureau.com/download/