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Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

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Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#61

Post by galaxyLogic »

mortenjorck wrote: post #32
starkparker wrote: post #4

It 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.

I think this all makes a lot more sense when seen in a practical context rather than the blown-up examples in the feature documentation. Take a look at the code editor examples on the main site for Github Monaspace: https://monaspace.githubnext.com Scroll down to the "Five Fonts" section and try unchecking the texture healing toggle. The fisheye effect you get when looking at the font in 200pt goes away at 16pt, and…

That's a good link. I think the text-healing mode with VS Dark Theme is clearly the most readable

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#62

Post by galaxyLogic »

andix wrote: post #23

Tried 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…

I think they should adjust their rules so that when a character is next to itself, both occurrences must use the same variant.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#63

Post by galaxyLogic »

ska wrote: post #47
beeforpork wrote: post #29

Hmm -- 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 in…

It seems to be a weird mix of half-assed kerning and scaling mixed together. Perceptually, based only on playing with it a minute, it seems to improve legibility a bit (but not as much as a proportional font would be) but also visually breaks the alignment a little sometimes. Not sure it's a worthwhile overall, but interesting.

I think it is intersting and can be improved

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#64

Post by galaxyLogic »

virtualritz wrote: post #36

This is great as it improves glyph/bg contrast when possible (i.e. readability of individual glyphs) and it makes the text's texture look more uniform (hence the name). Things people here seem to misunderstand: 1. The grid is not affected. The resp. letters stay within their grid-aligned bounding boxes. 2. Letters may change while you type but this is not noticeable in practice. I have a 3.2x2k 15" screen on my lapto…

I think monospace is good for code. It allows me to write two lines of code perhaps one commented out, and easily see which characters are different in which position.

So it's not only readability, but also "comparability".

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#65

Post by kurtoid »

andix wrote: post #23

Tried 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…

I was halfway through reading this trying to figure out if I wanted to give up my existing code ligatures, but then I hit the code ligatures section, and now I'm hooked

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#66

Post by Dylan16807 »

adastra22 wrote: post #59
Stratoscope wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be an unpopular opinion, but proportional fonts are great. One question people sometimes ask is, "How can you code in a proportional font? How do you line things up in columns?" The answer is you don't. For example, the Black code formatter for Python completely eschews column alignment of this sort: foo.bar(one, two, three) (Imagine that the words were long enough that the whole thing wouldn't fit on o…

"If you stop doing things which derive benefits from monospaced fonts, then you can get away with a proportional font." Thanks, but no. Your foo.bar() example is significantly less readable the way Black formats it.

I don't like the extra lines, but also I almost never care if "one" is exactly lined up with "two". You can use proportional fonts with the first example too.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#67

Post by eternityforest »

crazygringo wrote: post #54
gwern wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is this a fundamentally bad idea, or is it, like kerning in general (which can require thousands of pairs to be defined), something that just needs more work? It's not like this is limited to just a few pairs of letters like 'mi', or just pairs - if you've seen Fontemon https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html you know the sky is the limit for what the rewrites can do!

Specifically for monospace fonts, it's not obvious to me how any further work could fix it. The same letterform having different widths just looks bad and wrong. It's not like kerning, which always looks good when done well (for proportional fonts).

What about distributing the space amount more that one letter, and ensuring no two of the same letter are ever different. You'd allow things to get out of sync and not be on a perfect grid, so long as you could align everything at key points where a line has the same character on two successive lines, or some other case where you know you need alignment.

Everything else would just look like a proportional font.

Maybe it would influence coders too much and subconsciously make them choose names that line up well though...

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#68

Post by pikelet »

sublinear wrote: post #44
andix wrote: post #23

Tried 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…

> It might be nice for reading code, but for editing code it feels weird that glyphs change their size while you type. Applying display typography techniques to code is an objectively bad idea for both reading and writing. They even enable ligatures by default on the demo which is far worse. For those of us who actually have to get work done and not just fetishize code and fawn over aesthetics, it's a fundamental req…

Please stop diluting words like objectively for things that you just feel strongly about.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#70

Post by ec109685 »

finnh wrote: post #42
heisenzombie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this technique the letters do not leave their grid box. A wide letter next to a narrow letter will at most push hard up against the edge of its box (usually there has to be white space there so that, e.g. mm doesn’t become one glyph)

The text states that, but then in the Healing Examples section [0], the "m" in "filming" clearly spills over its left border line. Is that just a poorly drawn/incorrect example graphic? [0] https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/blob/main/docs/Textu...

It still makes lines with N characters take up the same amount of space, honoring the fundamental characteristic of monotype.
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