81–90 of 224 posts
The curly braces are rather weird. In my opinion, the pinnacle of FOSS monospace typefaces is JetBrains Mono.
One thing I really appreciate about fonts is the low-stakes nature of trying them out. Installing is easy, and doesn't take much space, you set your editor and try it out. There's no lock-in, switching back takes zero effort. So I'm always keen to give them a go, some stick, some don't. For what it's worth I'm in the no-ligature group. I want to see => not some ligature. But again that's subjective and there's room f…
The absolute worst is when a monospace font puts fi into a ligature with a width of 1 character, entirely defeating the purpose of being a monospaced font.
I don't love the aggressive curly braces. Does anyone else? I feel like the whole typeface here is consistently bland, and then there's the angry curly braces that pop out of nowhere.
All the other letters are nothing out of the ordinary, but the { } look really odd.
One thing I really appreciate about fonts is the low-stakes nature of trying them out. Installing is easy, and doesn't take much space, you set your editor and try it out. There's no lock-in, switching back takes zero effort. So I'm always keen to give them a go, some stick, some don't. For what it's worth I'm in the no-ligature group. I want to see => not some ligature. But again that's subjective and there's room f…
The absolute worst is when a monospace font puts fi into a ligature with a width of 1 character, entirely defeating the purpose of being a monospaced font.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The absolute worst is when a monospace font puts fi into a ligature with a width of 1 character, entirely defeating the purpose of being a monospaced font.
Can you provide an example of the font doing this? Substitution of individual characters with ligatures is in my experience a feature of the typesetting/display engine (which decides how to represent the "bytes" as glyphs), not the font itself. Indeed, this ligature substation is often something you can toggle in whatever application you're using if it's capable of doing the substitution at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The absolute worst is when a monospace font puts fi into a ligature with a width of 1 character, entirely defeating the purpose of being a monospaced font.
Can you provide an example of the font doing this? Substitution of individual characters with ligatures is in my experience a feature of the typesetting/display engine (which decides how to represent the "bytes" as glyphs), not the font itself. Indeed, this ligature substation is often something you can toggle in whatever application you're using if it's capable of doing the substitution at all.
Very glad to see more “low x height” monospace fonts (x height is the height of lowercase letters relative to capital letters; I haven’t checked to be sure but my eyes tell me this is on the lower side). Source Code Pro has been my go-to for a very long time, and it has always bothered me that Apple opted for higher x-heights in their San Francisco re-design of Helvetica (which already has a high x height to begin wi…
> Source Code Pro You nailed it - the reason I've stuck with this font for so long is that I really appreciate the beauty of a proper x-height more than I prefer the supposed readability advantages of tall coding fonts. As long a font gets the basic features right (tails on Iilt etc characters, dot in the 0) I've never struggled with reading in monospace for hours on end.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide an example of the font doing this? Substitution of individual characters with ligatures is in my experience a feature of the typesetting/display engine (which decides how to represent the "bytes" as glyphs), not the font itself. Indeed, this ligature substation is often something you can toggle in whatever application you're using if it's capable of doing the substitution at all.
OpenType fonts can define ligation pairs. If the editor implements OpenType ligatures, it will read the instructions from the font and implement them. There will probably be a setting to enable or disable ligatures entirely, and there may be another one for which ligatures to include.
Exactly.