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Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

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Re: Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

#31

Post by fluoridation »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #29
hootz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've read the entire website, but I still don't understand how a font for programming can be worth that much.

It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much, even disregarding its potential use in a commercial product. Of course, like open source software, free fonts do their best to undercut the market for individual professionals to make a living, but creating fonts isn't free.

>It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much

I mean, what are you comparing against? Rendering text in the null font? Sure, if that's really all you have then I guess spend $250 on an actual font, but even VGA is perfectly serviceable for a lot of tasks, and I'm not sure this font is $250 better than VGA, let alone something like DejaVu or what have you.

>creating fonts isn't free

At this point we should ask if it was necessary to create another font in the first place.

Re: Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

#32

Post by pixlmint »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #29
hootz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've read the entire website, but I still don't understand how a font for programming can be worth that much.

It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much, even disregarding its potential use in a commercial product. Of course, like open source software, free fonts do their best to undercut the market for individual professionals to make a living, but creating fonts isn't free.

JetBrains Mono does make it very hard to justify spending anything more than nothing on a good font though.

Re: Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

#33

Post by applfanboysbgon »

fluoridation wrote: post #31
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much, even disregarding its potential use in a commercial product. Of course, like open source software, free fonts do their best to undercut the market for individual professionals to make a living, but creating fonts isn't free.

>It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much I mean, what are you comparing against? Rendering text in the null font? Sure, if that's really all you have then I guess spend $250 on an actual font, but even VGA is perfectly serviceable for a lot of tasks, and I'm not sure this font is $250 better than VGA, let alone something like De…

> I mean, what are you comparing against? Rendering text in the null font?

No, I'm comparing against "whatever the default is". It's the same with chairs or beds. You can get "something to sit on" or "something to lay on" for $0 or close to it. But I will gladly pay a premium for the same reason - I spend 8+ hours a day in a chair, and 8+ hours a day in bed, so I don't even blink at paying any price to improve my daily QOL for years to come. Even if it's only by a little bit, a little bit of QOL over thousands of hours is an investment in your own happiness.

> At this point we should ask if it was necessary to create another font in the first place.

There's plenty of room for more fonts to exist. I have yet to find a monospaced coding font I like with Japanese support, and would gladly pay $250 if I found one.

Re: Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

#34

Post by neonstatic »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #23
cyphar wrote: post #8

I'm more of a bitmap font guy (at least, as long as my eyes continue to forgive me for it) but I'm always interested to see what other fonts there are around. It does look quite nice. I must admit when I ran across the second real paragraph from the main page, I couldn't help but only think more and more about how we will look back on marketing copy like this in a decade from now: AI assistants produce both code and…

> I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting" I don't know about such marketing copy, but keyboards with a "CoPilot key" are now standard, particularly on all Windows laptops, which is an even more egregious form of marketing.

The "Windows laptop special key" is a bit of a meme. Microsoft keeps changing it every few years to the new hot thing and it never catches on. It feels like "we have Command key at home".

Re: Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

#36

Post by applfanboysbgon »

neonstatic wrote: post #34
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting" I don't know about such marketing copy, but keyboards with a "CoPilot key" are now standard, particularly on all Windows laptops, which is an even more egregious form of marketing.

The "Windows laptop special key" is a bit of a meme. Microsoft keeps changing it every few years to the new hot thing and it never catches on. It feels like "we have Command key at home".

I have never seen a Windows laptop with the right ctrl key, or any normal key, replaced by a special key before CoPilot. I have six Windows laptops spread over 20 years and all of them before my most recent one have normal keys.

Re: Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

#37

Post by wishiwasaninja »

pmontra wrote: post #19

> MonoLisa ships as a variable font with two axes. Weight gives you every cut from Thin to Black in a single file — no megabytes per style. Grade fine-tunes typographic color by adjusting stroke thickness without changing glyph widths If any web page designer reads this, weight 1 and grade -50 is what many web pages look like, or even thinner than that. Weight 300 and grade 0 are the lower boundary of readability IMO…

Thanks for this alternate!

Re: Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

#38

Post by fluoridation »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #33
fluoridation wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much I mean, what are you comparing against? Rendering text in the null font? Sure, if that's really all you have then I guess spend $250 on an actual font, but even VGA is perfectly serviceable for a lot of tasks, and I'm not sure this font is $250 better than VGA, let alone something like De…

> I mean, what are you comparing against? Rendering text in the null font? No, I'm comparing against "whatever the default is". It's the same with chairs or beds. You can get "something to sit on" or "something to lay on" for $0 or close to it. But I will gladly pay a premium for the same reason - I spend 8+ hours a day in a chair, and 8+ hours a day in bed, so I don't even blink at paying any price to improve my dai…

Eh. To each his own. If it's about making improvements, I'm sure I could think of something to spend $250 on that would be more effective than a font, speaking for myself. There is such a thing as good enough, for me.

Re: Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

#39

Post by rhaps0dy »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #29
hootz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've read the entire website, but I still don't understand how a font for programming can be worth that much.

It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much, even disregarding its potential use in a commercial product. Of course, like open source software, free fonts do their best to undercut the market for individual professionals to make a living, but creating fonts isn't free.

I can't figure out why this font is better than DejaVu Mono, or Monaco (mac). They all look basically the same to me. I actually would love someone to explain what the difference/improvement is, in other parts of life I know subtle changes add up.

Re: Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

#40

Post by efficax »

$149 for a font for personal computer use is kind of steep! I would pay $20 for this, but the value has to be pretty high to pay $149 when there's a huge selection of free fonts on nerdfonts.com, of which many are pretty great. Like what does this font really offer that makes it so pricey?
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