Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 185 posts

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#71

Post by sevg »

o11c wrote: post #45

This, like many fonts, fails to handle vertical arrows: | ^ v | Note that the raised appearance of `^` exists for compatibility with typewriters that use the backspace key to use it as a circumflex accent over lowercase letters. This is doubly obsolete today (we have real combined characters and can use them on uppercase). This is one of those cases where the name originally used for the character in various standard…

> the way people actually have come to use it

I have never seen anyone use it as part of an up arrow spread across two lines in the way that you’re suggesting. So I don’t really understand your point.

Ok it’s not symmetrical, but I don’t buy your argument that it _should_ be (or that it’s a reasonable complaint to make about a font).

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#72

Post by typpilol »

java-man wrote: post #64
gorgoiler wrote: post #35

Very nice and condensed. The same reason I switched to Iosevka ( Joseph ), recently: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka The fun thing with Iosevka is that one stands a reasonable chance of reading the source code (as opposed to just random numbers in SplineSets etc.)

My favorite monospaced font, on Windows and Mac.

I switched to codenewroman mono with a nerd font.

Makes my terminal look amazing as well.

Especially since I've been working on a color scripts compilation that relies heavily on font being accurate

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#73

Post by baobun »

sayyadirfanali wrote: post #11
layer8 wrote: post #9

I despise this style of curly braces where the arms look more like “S” than like “ʃ”. Don’t go backwards! :)

a few others have raised the same point. in my defense i can only say that i adore that particular style because it looks more like what i draw by hand.

The curly braces are the one thing that really "pop out" from the font the moment I look at it. Even if I can agree they are pretty and even adorable, also visually noisy, distracting, and something that makes me not want to try the font out.

Being distinct from parens and brackets is obviously still desired and sorry I'm not a designer myself enough to give more specific feedback on how it could be improved.

Otherwise very attractive font.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#74

Post by sampo »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #44

I don't know why "->" should render as an arrow when we could just use an actual Unicode arrow. If need be, have macros for your editors that allow you to convert the "->" into an actual arrow.

> have macros for your editors that allow you to convert the "->" into an actual arrow.

Or, as suggested here, use language macros:

    #define → ->
https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/2023/01/5485.php

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#75

Post by Avshalom »

o11c wrote: post #45

This, like many fonts, fails to handle vertical arrows: | ^ v | Note that the raised appearance of `^` exists for compatibility with typewriters that use the backspace key to use it as a circumflex accent over lowercase letters. This is doubly obsolete today (we have real combined characters and can use them on uppercase). This is one of those cases where the name originally used for the character in various standard…

Come to APL we have ↑↓

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#76

Post by gdwatson »

gorgoiler wrote: post #35

Very nice and condensed. The same reason I switched to Iosevka ( Joseph ), recently: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka The fun thing with Iosevka is that one stands a reasonable chance of reading the source code (as opposed to just random numbers in SplineSets etc.)

Beside being a neat font in its own right, Iosevka allows for custom builds with different settings, selection from a bunch glyph variants, and custom ligature choices. It's pretty incredible.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#77

Post by crazygringo »

sayyadirfanali wrote: post #4
MarsIronPI wrote: post #2

Not trying to be negative, just confused: I don't really see how this font is "designed for symbol-heavy languages". The symbols look normal to me. Maybe the letters are a little more spaced? I'd love to be enlightened.

designer here. by symbol-heavy languages i mean languages like Perl and Haskell which make heavy use of symbols (sigils in Perl and operators in Haskell). Myna was designed after my frustration with other monospace fonts combined with my (self-imposed) inability to use ligatures.

I think it might be useful to put some screenshots of other fonts on your page, to show what symbol or alignment problems yours corrects. Because I've studied a lot of typeface design, and I can't really figure out what you're doing, what pain points you're trying to address.

Because when you say "and $, @, % seem ever mismatched?", I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. I certainly am curious though, since you went to all the work of building a new typeface!

And when you talk about fixing alignment, like all of these seem correctly vertically aligned with each other here on HN at least in monospace mode:

  =+-~
So if you could demonstrate what it is fixing with reference to the most common monospace system/coding fonts, I think that would help a ton.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#79

Post by teo_zero »

Beautiful.

The site should be more explicit about which characters are covered. I understand it's only ASCII, right? Although the example shows some currency signs that are definitely out of the 0-127 plane.

It would also be appreciated if you could suggest a fallback font for those glyphs not present in Myna, so that if I ever need to include the word "naïve" in a string, for example, the "ï" won't look as an alien character.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#80

Post by normie3000 »

sevg wrote: post #71
o11c wrote: post #45

This, like many fonts, fails to handle vertical arrows: | ^ v | Note that the raised appearance of `^` exists for compatibility with typewriters that use the backspace key to use it as a circumflex accent over lowercase letters. This is doubly obsolete today (we have real combined characters and can use them on uppercase). This is one of those cases where the name originally used for the character in various standard…

> the way people actually have come to use it I have never seen anyone use it as part of an up arrow spread across two lines in the way that you’re suggesting. So I don’t really understand your point. Ok it’s not symmetrical, but I don’t buy your argument that it _should_ be (or that it’s a reasonable complaint to make about a font).

> I have never seen anyone use it as part of an up arrow spread across two lines in the way that you’re suggesting.

You've never heard of "caret and stick"?

Post reply on HN