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Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

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11–20 of 103 posts

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#11
post #7

The thing I'm curious to see is this font feature being used while typing. I feel like the characters kind of "jiggling" behind your cursor as you type is going to be kind of weird, no?

We're at a point where the places that monospace prevails (code editors, obviously) have been festooned with so many other visual intrusions while typing that that additional jank the jiggling adds will be lost in the noise.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#12
I feel like this would drive me nuts when dealing with code, CSVs, or other kinds of data I'd commonly be viewing with a mono font. Two adjacent rows nearly identical rows might look more different than they really are, say because an "im" changed to an "wm" and the "m" is moving around.

That's not to say it's bad at all, just that I think it wouldn't be right for how I'd mostly likely be using such a font.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#14
post #7

The thing I'm curious to see is this font feature being used while typing. I feel like the characters kind of "jiggling" behind your cursor as you type is going to be kind of weird, no?

You see a bit of movement when writing "mimimimimi..." I don't know if I would have noticed that during "normal" editing.

But I don't like the font, so no real tests ;)

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#17

I'm not sure if the name “Texture Healing” is descriptive enough (perhaps I'm not that much of a typography nerd I think I am!), but I love the idea. Basically it resolves pairs or triplets of monospace letters to make some of them wider when adjacent letter can be made narrower instead. Another variation on that theme are “duospace fonts”, like iA Writer Duo [1]. Those use two character widths instead of one (i.e. w…

I've never heard "texture" used this way, although that's not saying much. My personal opinion would be that it's not the right word. I have heard the term “color” used in typography to describe the balance of positive and negative space on the page in phrases like “even (or uneven) color”. But although that feels closer, it also doesn't feel quite right in this case. It reminds me of the subtle changes in tracking and glyph width that some justification engines perform:

“Most of the type set in the past five hundred years is justified type, and most of it has been justified line by line, by the simple expedient of altering the space between the words. There are, however, better ways. Scribes justify text as they write by introducing abbreviations and subtly altering the widths of letters. Gutenberg replicated the feat by cutting and casting a host of abbreviations and ligatures along with multiple versions of certain letters differing modestly in width. In the early 1990s, Peter Karow and Hermann Zapf devised a means of doing much the same in the digital medium[.] [...] Another thing computer software can do – because Karow taught it how – is justify text by making subtle alterations in the spaces within letters as well as those between letters and words.”

The Elements of Typographic Style, fourth edition, by Robert Bringhurst, pp 191–192.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#18

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.

Yeah... I hate this. Solves a "problem" for someone with a different type of OCD than mine.

Re: Texture Healing for Monospace Fonts

#20

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.

This is going to make a lot of brains itch.
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