Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#131

Post by woodruffw » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

qbasic_forever wrote: post #64

humanistbot wrote: post #27

> Berkeley Mono wears a UNIX T-shirt and aspires to be etched on control panels in black synthetic lacquer. It is Adrian Frutiger visits Bell Labs. It is Gene Kranz's command. It operates with calibrated precision and has a datasheet. It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX

UNIX was an internal and then commercial product of ATT bell labs (and later Novell). You're misconstruing it with the FOSS movement. UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service, and then later sold and licensed to other companies to likewise improve their internal computer usage. UNIX was not created to be zero cost. Apparently a commercial license for UNIX cost $20k at the time (or $150 for universities…

The historical origin that I learned for UNIX was that it was created mostly out of frustration with Multics, and that its original "primary" use was running one of Ken Thompson's video games[1]. It was originally written for a PDP-7, which was already obsolete at the time and probably wasn't a target for telecommunications software.

It was only much later (and after significant arm twisting for more computing resources) that AT&T took UNIX seriously. Even then, the first marketed versions of UNIX were oriented towards programmers and technical editors, not telecommunication[2].

[1]: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#132

Post by salmo » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

qbasic_forever wrote: post #108

gjvc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service From where did you get this idea? Citation needed.

AT&T was in the business of selling telephone service. Bell labs (AT&T owned) was where UNIX was created. Why else would AT&T be researching computer systems if not to broaden and improve their marketshare in telecommunications?

You should read Kernighan’s “UNIX A History and a Memoir”. Seriously a great book.

UNIX was created with no purpose in mind other than to get some MULTICS-like functionality out of an old machine and not worry about design-by-committee.

The first real use for it was document processing and it took off from there. Never was a telecom system ever at AT&T AFAIK and didn’t do networking until much later.

There were no “teams” there, just someone would see what someone else was working on and dive in to help. Stick a bunch of smart people in a building and see what comes out.

R&D at Bell Labs was to play with ideas first and then find an application. That’s how we got the transistor and UNIX, and waaaay more things that never saw the light of day.

That mode of R&D is dead now. It was dying even as UNIX was being developed, and they got management cover. The use for speeding up technical documentation really was the first business value justification. That was also how they managed to get the PDP-11 and how C got created for the port.

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#133

Post by lidavidm » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

neilpanchal wrote: post #126

lidavidm wrote: post #119

This may be a dumb question, but how do you make a document like that fake patient chart in this demo? [1] Is there an editor that can do things like this? Or is it all laid out by hand? [1] https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-february-update/

Yes, done by hand, a lot of elbow grease. Same with the animation which took an insane amount of time (700 frames). Shout out to MonoDraw (Berkeley Mono works wonderfully with it): https://monodraw.helftone.com/

Ah, thank you for the response! I'm quite impressed, seeing that example nearly made me impulse buy the font.

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#134

Post by Aloha » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

qbasic_forever wrote: post #107

Aloha wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was certainly not created to sell more telephone service. It was a research project that found applications to run on it, most of which had little if anything to do with telephone service at first. Much later UNIX was adapted to run telephone network equipment.

Bell labs was doing research for AT&T, a telephone service company.

Much of what Bell Labs researched had little direct application to Telephones.

Bell Labs did a tremendous amount of basic research, materials science, and things with no direct commercial application.

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#135

Post by seabea » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

leetrout wrote: post #9

I would love to see ligatures incorporated but I understand that is a polarizing opinion. I love the little niceties of rendering arrows which are used all over the place these days.

Yup, instant purchase, if/when ligatures are added.

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#136

Post by neilpanchal » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #124

Looks nice in principle, but being suitable for the actual daily use (for coding) will depend on how it renders in a specific IDE at a specific size on a specific OS. There's LOTS of mono fonts that look great in larger sizes or on Macs, but that all but unbearable to look at in smaller sizes on Windows. There's no mention of this font having a manually hinted TTF version, which is pretty much required for rendering…

TTF hinting is automatic, using vertical and horizontal stem widths. Manual hinting is WIP. I've gotten feedback for trial fonts, please sign up for notifications at the bottom of the page and we'll email you when that's properly available. It requires some font engineering and writing up a license for it.

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#137

Post by neilpanchal » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

alecbz wrote: post #118

tasha0663 wrote: post #110

All those zero glyphs... is it getting hot in here?? Never seen that one with the negative-space slash. Is there a name for that?

I'm confused; what controls which of the zero glyphs you see?

We offer downloads of pre-configured stylistic sets (variations). All you need to do is download the specific version and install it. In applications such as Adobe Illustrator, you can select the variant using Open Type features: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/special-characters...

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#138

Post by gjvc » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:51 PM UTC

qbasic_forever wrote: post #108

gjvc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service From where did you get this idea? Citation needed.

AT&T was in the business of selling telephone service. Bell labs (AT&T owned) was where UNIX was created. Why else would AT&T be researching computer systems if not to broaden and improve their marketshare in telecommunications?

So you have no idea beyond an opinion?

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#139

Post by raegis » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

neilpanchal wrote: post #136

huhtenberg wrote: post #124

Looks nice in principle, but being suitable for the actual daily use (for coding) will depend on how it renders in a specific IDE at a specific size on a specific OS. There's LOTS of mono fonts that look great in larger sizes or on Macs, but that all but unbearable to look at in smaller sizes on Windows. There's no mention of this font having a manually hinted TTF version, which is pretty much required for rendering…

TTF hinting is automatic, using vertical and horizontal stem widths. Manual hinting is WIP. I've gotten feedback for trial fonts, please sign up for notifications at the bottom of the page and we'll email you when that's properly available. It requires some font engineering and writing up a license for it.

Do you have any screenshots with emacs or vim on Linux, and maybe a terminal?

Re: Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#140

Post by thereisnospork » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:56 PM UTC

NetOpWibby wrote: post #114

thereisnospork wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is more that the costs feel exorbitant with respect to both the perceived effort and utility. 75$ is half a year of Netflix - a product clearly born of extensive multi-disciplinary effort - which can't but feel excessive given that the marginal utility of a font is just so low. I guess I could summarize as saying that an expensive[0] font just isn't, or more strongly, can't be interesting.[1] [0]M…

Netflix is entertainment, typefaces have a LOT more utility in my life. Maybe I'm weird because I regularly purchase typefaces but $75 is a STEAL. Holy shit. The commercial license for this is also a steal. Seems like on here, free typefaces are desired but a lot of these free typefaces are released by multi-million dollar corporations...they have someone on payroll to work on them. I welcome indie typographers.

I totally get why they charge, and for what they do - can't blame anyone for not working for free - I just genuinely can't picture a value proposition in the product commiserate with the effort.

At least personally, I find fonts are something that normalize very quickly. If I change the font on my text editor, I'd notice for a day or so but then it would cease to be 'a font' and go back to being 'words on screen'. I've only really noticed 'displeasure' at a working font[1] when I've got two machines and the settings wind up desynced so one doesn't look like 'how it's supposed to' according to my brain.

[0]e.g. if Hacker News changed its font I really might not notice.

[1]Exempting crap like Papyrus