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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

#161

Post by gjm11 »

codazoda wrote: post #159

Looks pretty nice. I could download and try it but one character I find missing, from the sample, is emdash. I wrote a lot of markdown and many programming typefaces get emdash wrong (it’s hard to tell from a regular dash). Looks like I’ll have to install this to see if it’s the case here. BTW, I find the screenshots for this font quite a bit more useful in evaluating it than any of the other fonts referenced in the…

You're absolutely correct! The em-dash isn't just another character—it's the foundation of good writing style. Would you like me to show you some examples of how important em-dashes are for good writing?

(Sorry.)

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

#162

Post by abdulhaq »

gjm11 wrote: post #161
codazoda wrote: post #159

Looks pretty nice. I could download and try it but one character I find missing, from the sample, is emdash. I wrote a lot of markdown and many programming typefaces get emdash wrong (it’s hard to tell from a regular dash). Looks like I’ll have to install this to see if it’s the case here. BTW, I find the screenshots for this font quite a bit more useful in evaluating it than any of the other fonts referenced in the…

You're absolutely correct! The em-dash isn't just another character—it's the foundation of good writing style. Would you like me to show you some examples of how important em-dashes are for good writing? (Sorry.)

lol

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

#163

Post by abdulhaq »

piekvorst wrote: post #140

I don’t get why should programming fonts be necessarily monospaced.

That's a fair question, for one thing white space is often important and sometimes very important, so we need spacing to be very clear. Also it can be useful to have vertical alignment to indicate a pattern in the code or data.

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

#164

Post by kazinator »

sayyadirfanali wrote: post #102
kazinator wrote: post #78

> Do you ever feel like your font treats symbols as second-class glyphs? No because this problem has been solved by other font designers working with pretty much exactly the same requirements.

thanks for the feedback. if that be the case, i'm afraid Myna might not be of much use to you.

That's not the case.

Rather, you don't provide reasons to motivate people to switch to your font and stick with it.

You have mainly two kinds of users:

- those who have always stuck with whatever font came up by default in their text editor or terminal emulator.

- those who have gone through a phase of experimenting and tried a good bunch of fonts, then settled.

When you motivate the former group to experiment, they will tend to go into the second group: once they get into the workflow of installing fonts, they won't just stop at the one that was suggested to them first.

The second group is harder to motivate to try new fonts; they will do it if there is some compelling reason they can understand /before/ installing.

You don't explain how your font stands out above the competition. Or, maybe the personal angle: I tried these fifteen different fonts and still had to make one because X, Y, Z, so here it is.

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

#165

Post by trueismywork »

IshKebab wrote: post #137
sayyadirfanali wrote: post #109

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.

I kind of think monospacing is overrated in programming. Sroustrup typeset the entire of The C++ Programming Language in variable width font and it looks totally fine. I've used variable width fonts in my editor a fair bit too. I think the main problem with it is you need to use tabs for indentation and unfortunately spaces comprehensively won that battle. IMO that's because although tabs are clearly better, spaces a…

Speak for yourself please. I have problems reading and writing code which is not monospace

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

#166

Post by sayyadirfanali »

kazinator wrote: post #164
sayyadirfanali wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for the feedback. if that be the case, i'm afraid Myna might not be of much use to you.

That's not the case. Rather, you don't provide reasons to motivate people to switch to your font and stick with it. You have mainly two kinds of users: - those who have always stuck with whatever font came up by default in their text editor or terminal emulator. - those who have gone through a phase of experimenting and tried a good bunch of fonts, then settled. When you motivate the former group to experiment, they…

i thought the illustrations were enough to decide if one likes the font.

now i have also added a comparison table of Myna with many popular monospace fonts (if that could help gauge the utility).

i understand that there would be many many folks who would find this font ugly and unusable. it is largely a matter of personal preference.

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

#167

Post by pessimizer »

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).

Rust compiler error output certainly uses a lot of vertical arrows. But it also highlights the fact that the caret is often used to highlight characters on the line above, and if it were lower it would be worse at doing that.

I do hate this asymmetry when I'm trying to do an ASCII flowchart of some sort.

But I'd also like to add that calling it an unreasonable complaint sounds a little hysterical. It's just a complaint. It's also a clear one, and of obvious use.

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

#168

Post by pessimizer »

sayyadirfanali wrote: post #50
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…

thanks for pointing it out. as i mention below in a comment, there are bound to be many combinations which don't align (especially vertical ones). i would ideally tell you to invoke a feature request but i am not sure this esoteric combination could even be detected in a contextual alternate rule (which Myna doesn't support anyways for now). beside if i may say so in my defense, the comparison is a bit unfair as a V…

> won't make sense to break programmatic convention of the caret operator

I don't know why the elevated position of the caret is sacred, other than to use as an accent mark. It could cause confusion with the ∧ (AND).

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

#169

Post by kazinator »

sayyadirfanali wrote: post #166
kazinator wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the case. Rather, you don't provide reasons to motivate people to switch to your font and stick with it. You have mainly two kinds of users: - those who have always stuck with whatever font came up by default in their text editor or terminal emulator. - those who have gone through a phase of experimenting and tried a good bunch of fonts, then settled. When you motivate the former group to experiment, they…

i thought the illustrations were enough to decide if one likes the font. now i have also added a comparison table of Myna with many popular monospace fonts (if that could help gauge the utility). i understand that there would be many many folks who would find this font ugly and unusable. it is largely a matter of personal preference.

Don't misunderstand; the examples do look great.

> find this font ugly and unusable

Not even remotely the case; they would have to get their heads examined.

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

#170

Post by johnisgood »

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.

Rust is super symbol-heavy, too.
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