this looks really nice except 0's often look super weirdly fat and out of place
Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
#22It seems to me the problem with that font is that the strokes are way too thick, making the "m" look like it's almost all ink, and it also seems that the lowercase characters are far too tall for their width.
If you use a normal stroke width (one that makes the empty space in the "m" as wide as the stroke) and width/height ratio for all characters, the problem naturally disappears, and in fact this is not a problem for instance in Linux terminals with the default fonts (normally DejaVu Sans Mono), where the characters look perfectly natural and fine.
Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
#23Tried it here: https://monaspace.githubnext.com/
It might be nice for reading code, but for editing code it feels weird that glyphs change their size while you type.
Also readability wise I'm not convinced. In the example there is a combination like "_m_", in this case the lette m is much nicer to read. But then i typed "mml", which makes the two m's very different looking. Also the line number 10 on top of 11 looks weird.
Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
#24It bothers way me more that the same glyph can differ within the same word than it satisfies me that the glyphs are very slightly more proportional. The third "m" in the "minimum" example being narrower than the "m"s adjacent to the two "i"s makes my brain itch. Same for the "i"s in "miniature". Makes me feel like I'm looking through a fish-eye lens, or that my glasses prescription is off.
This is going to make a lot of brains itch.
My brain seems to scan for differences to familiar patterns. For code that just doesn't look right. When I see stuff like this, it feels like finding a bug/typo. So a lot of false alarms.
Maybe my brain would adjust after a while. And maybe I'm also different to other people. I think my reading skills are a bit skewed towards recognizing words/patterns instead of reading characters (probably some form of compensation for my dyslexia).
Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
#25I tried out Monaspace but felt that the fonts were a bit thin for my QHD monitor I use as my primary display. It might be better on a retina/4k monitor though.
Perhaps fonts are something you get used to after some time using it, but I ended up switching back to my favorite font, Input Mono (which, as a coding font, isn't actually monospace, so it brings a bunch of cool features and doesn't need to do texture healing).
Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
#26I tried out Monaspace but felt that the fonts were a bit thin for my QHD monitor I use as my primary display. It might be better on a retina/4k monitor though. Perhaps fonts are something you get used to after some time using it, but I ended up switching back to my favorite font, Input Mono (which, as a coding font, isn't actually monospace, so it brings a bunch of cool features and doesn't need to do texture healing…
Monospace can be parameterized, you can just make the font weight larger.
Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
#27It is impressive and interesting, but I would suggest just using proportional fonts and stop caring about alignment.
Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
#28Isn't this just kerning but with extra steps?
Monospaced Kerning would be a better name than "Texture Healing".
Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
#29Hmm -- I do not understand what is the use case for this. For best design, clearly, I'd use a proportional font. So whenever I want a monospace font, there are reasons that exclude proportional fonts. An obvious reason would be a grid that the letters need to be arranged in (for whatever reason). But then, I can only imagine that any smart rearrangement of letters out of their grid box will be unwanted, because it interfere with that grid. Instead, stupidly simple letter placement will be what I want.
I have an idea for an advanced technique that yields much better visual appearance (but that is also not want you'd want, for the same reasons): instead of just focussing on pairs of letters (so primitive!), consider whole words and optimise their letters' shape, width, and horizontal position, but keep the size of box of the word. I call that 'equilibrium texture healing'.
Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts
#30I'm not sure if the name “Texture Healing” is descriptive enough (perhaps I'm not that much of a typography nerd I think I am!), but I love the idea. Basically it resolves pairs or triplets of monospace letters to make some of them wider when adjacent letter can be made narrower instead. Another variation on that theme are “duospace fonts”, like iA Writer Duo [1]. Those use two character widths instead of one (i.e. w…
I've never heard "texture" used this way, although that's not saying much. My personal opinion would be that it's not the right word. I have heard the term “color” used in typography to describe the balance of positive and negative space on the page in phrases like “even (or uneven) color”. But although that feels closer, it also doesn't feel quite right in this case. It reminds me of the subtle changes in tracking a…
I think "texture" makes sense, if only by analogy to the calligraphic hand Textura, or the etymological derivation of "text" itself.