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Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

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Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> can use proportional fonts with the first example too.

what, how? Wouldn't the number of spaces you'd need to prefix lines 2 and 3 with vary between fonts?

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#72
Wow I didn't think I would but I really hate this.

Not having the glyph of a specific letter always align with itself vertically in a monospace font is just horrendous. It's so unpleasant for me to look at it makes the whole horizontal spacing thing moot.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#73

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…

This might be an autism thing for me but turning on texture healing on that page is so horrible it actually made me flinch.

The fact that the "i" in "terminal dimensions" and the "i" in "width" aren't underneath each other makes it look like my monitor is broken or something. It's like someone has done it on purpose to mess with me.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#74
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This ship has literally sailed, hyperbole continues to affect our language whether we want it or not.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#75

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've been really enjoying Intel One Mono which seems to solve this by adding more space around most characters (two extra pixels per side at the size I like, about 17px capital letter top to bottom if I counted right) except the m and w (I think, I didn't check everything; they still get one pixel on each side). It also has a low x-height and tall line height and doesn't even try to work at small font sizes but it looks really nice if you make it big enough. Comparing with my previous favorite DejaVu Sans Mono (aka Bitstream Vera Sans Mono) it seems like all the extra space visually evens out the letters and it works well without this kind of adjustment.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#76
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…

> But then i typed "mml", which makes the two m's very different looking.

Agreed. I find this even more noticeable and distracting with narrow characters; e.g. in “llm”, one of the “l”s reads like “1” to me.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#77

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.

That formatting is extremely common in dynamic languages. Are you from the C/C++ world?

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#78
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…

Ligatures are great if done right. E.g. the set in Fira Code gives me a 2 character wide ≠ instead of != so it retains the monospace widths.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> can use proportional fonts with the first example too. what, how? Wouldn't the number of spaces you'd need to prefix lines 2 and 3 with vary between fonts?

Not if you don't care about "one" exactly lining up with "two".

  foo.bar(one
        two,
        three) //this is fine, and slight drift on different fonts is also fine
I would have demonstrated in a proper proportional way but HN destroys NBSP.
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