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Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

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

#111
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…

> 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 The origins don’t really matter at this point. That’s what the character looks like and it’s what everyone expects. Your use case is extremely niche. Making a font choice for that specific double-line situation would aliena…

any particular glyph you find surprising in Myna? feel free to open a feature request.

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

#112
post #87

My favorite monospace font is "Ubuntu Mono" for ages. As an engineer, I like to see -- for the lack of better word -- some taste instead of characters being too formal and too symmetric. Ubuntu and Ubuntu-Mono satisfy this to a good extent without being too much, like in comic sans. The closest font with similar taste, which I found recently is Mononoki

I've also been using Ubuntu Mono for ages. Must be 15 years now! I have tried many other fonts, just to see if I'd enjoy a change, but the most jarring thing is how much space all other fonts seem to have. Ubuntu Mono gives me way more lines on screen, without setting the font size far too small. Is the "condensed" property that is being mentioned in this thread? I've asked about this before but nobody has ever said "condensed".

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

#113

Also see the JuliaMono typeface: https://juliamono.netlify.app It was designed to be a comprehensive monocode typeface to support Julia's full Unicode support.

Thanks for the link, at first glance seems like a fascinatingly rich font (by the way, to overcome the char/font limit they can publish JuliaMono2 and 3 and 4 and then set those as fallback fonts to reach the full coverage...)

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

#114
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.

Using Unicode would be awful. I have a button on my keyboard for every character I need. How do I type a unicode arrow? Oh, now I need editor macros? Or I need to get out a special keyboard per language?

Unicode is not there for you to necessarily use the whole thing. It's there so that everyone in the world can encode their text the same way, despite having a completely different set of characters on their keyboards.

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

#115
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

This is not valid C, though. The characters allowed for identifiers are defined in Unicode Standard Annex #31, and those easily understood as operators, like arrows, are not included.

Unless you extend the language reference beyond the limits of #31, of course

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

#116

Genuine question: is everyone coding on such high resolution displays and/or with font sizes so big nowadays? For me, the example screenshots are useless to see how the font would actually look like in my editor.

Not me. Ubuntu Mono is the only font I'm able to use because all others I've tried just take up so much space. I'm literally losing lines of text with other fonts. I need that density. I haven't tried this one yet, though.

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

#117

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.)

You should check out Pragmasevka https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka

Switched from Iosevka to this, feels a little more readable.

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

#118
post #105

> Are you frustrated that -> looks nothing like an arrow The proper solution is, of course, to allow ←arrows→ (and, naturally, not trying to fit a variable peg into a monowidth whole)... maybe in the next generation of languages when the bottom level of typesetting quality is raised a bit

i have addressed this in one of the other comments. it is impossible to achieve both elegance (good look) and consistency (monospace width) in these cases. many folks, like yourself, are pioneering full Unicode editing. we, on the other end, are just trying to make editing without ligatures elegant because ASCII, i believe, would remain predominant for a long time to come.

well, my "pioneering efforts" :) are killed by language designers, as you note "it is impossible", so we can only waste time looking for various workarounds like using fonts designed around those limits...

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

#119
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not valid C, though. The characters allowed for identifiers are defined in Unicode Standard Annex #31, and those easily understood as operators, like arrows, are not included.

Unless you extend the language reference beyond the limits of #31, of course

Sorry, who is "you" in your sentence? The C workgroup?

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

#120
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have addressed this in one of the other comments. it is impossible to achieve both elegance (good look) and consistency (monospace width) in these cases. many folks, like yourself, are pioneering full Unicode editing. we, on the other end, are just trying to make editing without ligatures elegant because ASCII, i believe, would remain predominant for a long time to come.

well, my "pioneering efforts" :) are killed by language designers, as you note "it is impossible", so we can only waste time looking for various workarounds like using fonts designed around those limits...

i think that you also maintained that it is impossible to reconcile monospace with Unicode.

what would be ideal is a variable-width font which covers most Unicode characters consistently. some Unicode characters (eg, arrow) would need space of 2 characters and so on. making it elegant would require quite a lot of work to ensure Unicode does't look out of place (eg, arrow in your comment).

these are the problems which make me feel full Unicode editing is difficult to achieve in the short run. not to mention the obvious issue of typing Unicode characters from the ASCII keyboard.

i've included a reasonable subset of Unicode in Myna but it may not look very good. don't get me wrong, i appreciate the Unicode advocacy. but until we've something good-looking and well-behaving tooling on that side, using it would be quite frustrating.

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