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Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

blakewatson.com

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Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#21

Post by bsimpson »

Isn't the whole point of monospaced fonts columnar alignment (e.g. the table in the article)? Seems like "almost" defeats the point.

Then again, I don't see values lined up much these days:

    {
      "someKey":       "someValue",
      "someOtherKey:"  "someOtherValue,
and if you only care about leading whitespace (that is, the whitespace before a character appears on the line), maybe it doesn't matter how your font is spaced.

I suspect numbers in these almost-mono fonts are monospaced, so numerical values should still have nice rhythm too.

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#22

Post by blakewatson »

zichy wrote: post #5

I like your taste – Input and IBM Plex (on which the iA Writer family is based) are my favorites as well. iA's old typeface Nitti is great as well.

Nitti is the OG monospaced writing font for me. Soon as I experienced it on those older versions of iA Writer I was hooked. I do love IBM Plex and these derivatives but I also miss Nitti. Might have to pick that one up from Bold Monday for old times' sake.

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#24

Post by blakewatson »

bsimpson wrote: post #21

Isn't the whole point of monospaced fonts columnar alignment (e.g. the table in the article)? Seems like "almost" defeats the point. Then again, I don't see values lined up much these days: { "someKey": "someValue", "someOtherKey:" "someOtherValue, and if you only care about leading whitespace (that is, the whitespace before a character appears on the line), maybe it doesn't matter how your font is spaced. I suspect…

Yeah, you’re right. You lose columnar alignment but beginning indentation still aligns and, in Input Sans, I believe the numbers are tabular. David Jonathan Ross makes this argument in the explainer for Input:

> Sometimes programmers rely on the monospaced grid to create a second column of values or comments on the right side of the page. It’s true, these secondary columns won’t align in a proportionally spaced font. But why are we making these columns in the first place? Even in a monospaced font they can be finnicky and hard to maintain.

> In virtually every other form of typography, the responsibility of alignment is given to the typesetting application, not the font. If source code editors can highlight syntax, they could also interpret tabs and syntax to create true, adjustable columns of text.

https://input.djr.com/info/

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#25

Post by syrrim »

> You might be thinking, “Okay, but now characters won’t line up neatly.” Thats true, but the upside of this sizing means you still retain the typewriter aesthetic with a bit more legibility. Notice the difference?

Does it? It feels like the "typewriter aesthetic" is pretty much gone. The comically wide thin characters (i, r, l, etc), and comically small wide chars (m, w) are the clearest difference of such a font; without that it looks like a normal proportional font (which it basically is).

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#27

Post by systemvoltage »

blakewatson wrote: post #20
systemvoltage wrote: post #16

I am not convinced. They should just finish the fitting/kerning. Seems like a fad more than anything else. In the screenshot, if you were to see a properly fitted proportional version of iA Quattro, you'd ditch iA Quattro. But that comparison is not presented, I don't think they've tried making a proportional version of it.

That’s a good point. Something close to a "properly fitted proportional version of iA Quattro" might be Nitti Grotesk. https://www.boldmonday.com/typeface/nitti-grotesk/

It's like this: A) Here is an unbaked cake. B) Here is a half-baked cake. But, the argument they are making is B) is better than C) Fully baked cake. No fully baked cake is presented for evaluation.

You can't use Nitti Grotesk, a cookie batter, to make an argument here either for a fair comparison. It's an entirely different thing.

In order to do a proper comparison, they should finish the kerning job and present their arguments fairly and squarly.

The image I am talking about is: https://i0.wp.com/blakewatson.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022...

It needs a 3rd line "iA Writer Proportional". Looking at the word "next" in iA Quattro, the fitting looks really bad which is a known trade-off in monospaced typefaces, but not an excuse to leave it like that in a proportional typeface.

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#28

Post by syrrim »

rgovostes wrote: post #6

See also: Duospaced font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duospaced_font

That article is strange. I was of the belief that most western "monospace" fonts were in fact "duospaced" under their definition. This distinction isn't apparent for normal writing, but such fonts usually make most emoji two chars wide. This is true at the very least for Adobe's "source code pro", which I typically use. It mentions the OP font as the only western example of such a font, but iA writer doesn't use integer multiples of the base width (necessary to qualify under their definition, as well as under common sense) for M and W.

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#29

Post by shagie »

every wrote: post #26

I prefer Source Code Pro for the terminal: https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-code-pro/

Source Code Pro was my go to for a long time ( https://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/source-code-pro/ gets into the design of it) - the 1Il|iO0oB8 set is where its most interesting to me (and why I liked it).

However, when Jetbrains Mono came out, I switched my code editors to it (IntelliJ was trivial) - https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ (and no, I don't like ligatures). The slightly larger lowercase high at the same font size makes it a bit easier to read without boosting the entire editor's font size up, the 'g' debate I lean to the single story, open tail form ( https://www.typeroom.eu/the-elusive-mystery-of-letter-g-expl... ).

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#30

Post by joshjb17 »

Two big reasons for continuing to use monospaced fonts in programming:

1) Support for vim navigation, where hjkl move you one character in a direction on an evenly spaced grid. Remove that uniform spacing and up ceases to be “up”

2) Legibility for formatted comments and ASCII art (could argue these should be avoided but I’ve seen some magical ASCII art in code)

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