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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

#51
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on what you are used to. I draw them like “ʃ” by hand, and find the more squiggly style unnecessarily noisy visually. It makes the brace direction a little less obvious to see at first glance.

surprisingly enough for me, the exact same point was raised by others too. meanwhile, i was totally unaware that many would find it hard to read it as i never ever had any difficulty telling them apart even with the (admittedly baroque) design of the braces. if that is the only feature stopping you from trying this, please make a feature request. maybe i could issue a "disambiguous braces" variant.

I'm gonna raise another point, however. I think Myna's braces are easier to distinguish from each other: "(" and "{". After spending all day coding, they start to look very similar. I agree it might not be super beautiful, but for me, Myna has this advantage.

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

#52
post #42

Looks pretty good, but I often need to read Japanese characters so I'm gonna stick to IBM Plex, which has both Monospace and CJK variants.

> IBM Plex

I found what while it's not the best for me - it is suprisingly good for a PowerPoint-like presentations, #specially the condensced vars.

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

#53
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…

Are you trying to get a ligature that crosses lines?

You could maybe try U+2303 (⌃) for the up arrowhead, but why not just use U+2191 (↑) for the standard arrow?

The crossbar height of lowercase letters is not a common typographical reference point...

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

#54

It would be nice to see some comparison with other fonts on the GitHub page; the symbols look normal to me, at least. It looks very pretty regardless!

thanks for pointing it out. i would need to consider that idea.

the symbols are all pure ASCII and are supposed to look normal. it is not a ligature font and neither focusses on Unicode symbols. the symbols are just more evenly adjusted with the letters and with each other.

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

#55

It would be nice to see some comparison with other fonts on the GitHub page; the symbols look normal to me, at least. It looks very pretty regardless!

thanks for pointing it out. i would need to consider that idea. the symbols are all pure ASCII and are supposed to look normal. it is not a ligature font and neither focusses on Unicode symbols. the symbols are just more evenly adjusted with the letters and with each other.

That's something I really like about this front. I'm not a huge fan of ligatures and think they're counter productive. Makes it a bit harder to see the differences though, so I think a comparison would be great.

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

#56

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.

As a counter example, I always decrease the font-size everywhere. The annoying trend of bloating everything with whitespace, means that less and less stuff fits on the screen. But even HN is on 80% right now.

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

#58
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…

I don't see such a niche use case as a design failure.

By your logic, the lowercase "v" should extend even higher to meet the pipe. The caret has conventionally been higher for a long time, and IMO would look out of place making it the inverse "v".

If you want arrows, just use U+2191 and U+2193.

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

#59
post #53
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…

Are you trying to get a ligature that crosses lines? You could maybe try U+2303 (⌃) for the up arrowhead, but why not just use U+2191 (↑) for the standard arrow? The crossbar height of lowercase letters is not a common typographical reference point...

I don't care about ligatures, just symmetry.

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

#60
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…

Your point about the caret is interesting, but I'm a bit dubious about using them for vertical arrows. I don't think it would be practical to type this combination in one go, since the two symbols would be on two separate lines. For the upward arrow, are you suggesting caret-return-space-space-space-...-vertical bar? Are there any programming languages that use vertical arrows? Do they appear on one line or two?

> Are there any programming languages that use vertical arrows? Do they appear on one line or two?

Befunge (1993; many later languages were inspired by it) uses just the ASCII arrowheads. The arrow tail is more likely to exist in doc comments.

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