61–70 of 97 posts
Small caps looks slick. I wish more websites used it.
I think he got this style from classic reference books like Elements of Style. It does look super sharp.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'm waiting to see if BM condensed ever arrives. I am thinking it won't. I don't think it would take this long if they really intended to get v2 out the door. It's vaporware.
BM condensed, where does that land on the Bristol stool scale? Sorry I couldn't resist. I am actually curious about this though, the Berkeley Mono font I found with a search does look quite nice. What's the deal with v2?
"We threw away almost all of v1.00X, Berkeley Mono v2.000 improves substantially on legibility, fitting, and cohesiveness, especially for bold weights."
If I hadn't heard of v2 I wouldn't be missing it. But I have heard of it, goshdarnit, and now I want to see the new shininess!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proprietary OS problem. Linux distributions package and distribute all the fonts they're legally allowed to ship. Every font I ever cared to use can be found in the repositories. And they don't strip out features either. I get to customize everything about Fira Code.
> Every font I ever cared to use can be found in the repositories. If you have to download/install them separately then it means it doesn't ship with it. The fact that you can install it from the distro repositories means nothing to a third party website that can't assume you have done so.
The Linux distributions did their jobs with excellence. The fonts are all there and installing them is a oneliner. The web folks made their own OS though so if anyone is to be blamed it's whoever is in charge of that OS called the web platform.
Who's in charge of the web as a platform these days? Google. Who is no doubt profiting from the Google Fonts thing.
Small caps looks slick. I wish more websites used it.
I commented elsewhere on this; Butterick uses small caps for internal links in Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com/ I think he got this style from classic reference books like Elements of Style. It does look super sharp.
Tabular numerals are such a valuable feature. It's a bummer they're not more prevalent.
I like tabular numerals. But you really need a small set of other glyphs to be tabular to really make them work. In particular, you need the plus and minus signs to be the same width, so that in a table like: gold +1.2% oil -6.4% corn +5.2% everything lines up and looks nice. At the moment, with CSS, there's no way to make that happen, and in normal typefaces the hyphen-minus is too narrow. You can replace the minus…
€ 1.20
HTML 4 was still in this weird in-between time where there were styling attributes in HTML coexisting with the upcoming CSS. Afair no browser ever implemented character alignment and in Google’s HTML it is only written up as obsolete:
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#dom-tab...
Styling in general is of course a CSS thing – but thinking about it arranging alignment in multiple interdependent elements is a problem which not just need a property but a layout algorithm which browsers then need to implement. So we still don’t have nice things.
> It occurs to me that contextual alternates could make this Just Work.
The replacement mechanism in OpenType fonts is surprisingly useful. I remember Apple’s San Francisco font switches between different variants of the colon if it follows text characters ("my proposal: nuke it from the orbit") or if it exists between numbers as in a time ("23:52"); in the latter it is more centered.
This was my nudge to see if Berkeley Mono v2 is out yet. It is not.
What is going on with the wght (weight) axis? When I slide to the left of 400, the text condenses as it gets thinner. But to the right of 400, the text does not expand, it just gets thicker. So it would not appear to be a continuous variable, as the slider would suggest.
What is going on with the wght (weight) axis? When I slide to the left of 400, the text condenses as it gets thinner. But to the right of 400, the text does not expand, it just gets thicker. So it would not appear to be a continuous variable, as the slider would suggest.
It still expands, just not as much as before.