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Victor Mono Typeface

rubjo.github.io

21–30 of 154 posts

Re: Victor Mono Typeface

#21
I'm generally pretty supportive of new typefaces, but this one strikes me as... not very legible.

The x-height is so uncommonly high it makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish between uppercase/ascending and lowercase letters at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'u', or 'h' vs. 'n'), and similarly the descender is so tiny it makes it hard to distinguish certain letters at a glance (e.g. 'q' vs 'p'). The whole point of large-enough ascenders and descenders is to recognize the shapes of whole words before looking at their letters, which these dimensions destroy.

The extremely square aspect of rounded segments similarly makes them harder to distinguish from straight segments at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'O' are far more similar than you want for legibility).

Not to mention, italic cursive is particularly difficult to read. Handwritten-style cursive was never designed for legibility -- it was designed for speed in writing. Adopting it in a body-text typeface meant for reading adds work for the reader to decipher it.

I don't want to be so negative, but typeface design has certain principles that the creator is simply ignoring. They're not arbitrary or aesthetic, but rather are directly about functional legibility.

At the end of the day, this typeface goes out of its way to be surprisingly difficult to read. You can read it, but it simply takes more effort. Which is generally the last thing you want in a typeface for coding (or anything body text).

Re: Victor Mono Typeface

#22
Sorry, ligatures are not for me. I don't get it. Why would you ever want symbols to collapse like that in a functional monospace font? Just looks like a bunch of funky unicode characters peppered throughout my source. And my caret can travel _inside_ one of these special marks? No thanks.

Re: Victor Mono Typeface

#25

I'm generally pretty supportive of new typefaces, but this one strikes me as... not very legible. The x-height is so uncommonly high it makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish between uppercase/ascending and lowercase letters at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'u', or 'h' vs. 'n'), and similarly the descender is so tiny it makes it hard to distinguish certain letters at a glance (e.g. 'q' vs 'p'). The whole point of large-…

Same reaction here. Legibility is below-average, and I don't love the look & feel either.

Re: Victor Mono Typeface

#26

I'm generally pretty supportive of new typefaces, but this one strikes me as... not very legible. The x-height is so uncommonly high it makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish between uppercase/ascending and lowercase letters at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'u', or 'h' vs. 'n'), and similarly the descender is so tiny it makes it hard to distinguish certain letters at a glance (e.g. 'q' vs 'p'). The whole point of large-…

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Re: Victor Mono Typeface

#27

Sorry, ligatures are not for me. I don't get it. Why would you ever want symbols to collapse like that in a functional monospace font? Just looks like a bunch of funky unicode characters peppered throughout my source. And my caret can travel _inside_ one of these special marks? No thanks.

Do you also care about inverted scroll and dark/light themes? None of it matters.

Re: Victor Mono Typeface

#28

I'm generally pretty supportive of new typefaces, but this one strikes me as... not very legible. The x-height is so uncommonly high it makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish between uppercase/ascending and lowercase letters at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'u', or 'h' vs. 'n'), and similarly the descender is so tiny it makes it hard to distinguish certain letters at a glance (e.g. 'q' vs 'p'). The whole point of large-…

[flagged]

Being supportive of new typefaces doesn't mean you have to like everything you see?

Personally, I'm biased because I prefer the "good old" typewriter-style monospace fonts with serifs, which already eliminates around 90% of "programming fonts". My current favorite (not only for Go) is Go Mono (https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts).

Re: Victor Mono Typeface

#29

Does anyone know where the use of cursive-style characters in monospace fonts originated from? (My guess would be that it came from something like Operator Mono from Hoefler & Co.) I've always found the cursive to be a little jarring, since the cursive characters usually look so different from the normal ones, and switching between cursive and normal styles makes it slower for me to visually parse a section of code.…

Surely cursive was developed to make handwriting faster, not to enhance legibility?

Re: Victor Mono Typeface

#30
I'm curious, does anybody else change their terminal/editor font about once every two months only to immediately decide."no I don't like change" and go back to their standard? (In my case JetBrains Mono)

I'd don't know if it's that I genuinely prefer that font, or just that I've spent so long looking at it my brain can't handle anything else.

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