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Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

berkeleygraphics.com

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Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#71

Post by pjerem »

helmholtz wrote: post #14
huhtenberg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website is fantastic. Font looks great and samples are an eye candy, so tried it just now. Windows, 1920 x 1200 @ 96 dpi, Visual Studio, light-on-dark theme. I like 'em small to fit more on the screen and at 8px this font looks janky. It is blurry with uneven thickness and requires an eye strain to read. It doesn't seem to be hinted at all even though it is a TTF version. Here's Berkley Mono on the left and Mensc…

1920x1200? 96 DPI?! Both those fonts look like absolute garbage, and how could they not? Only, in my opinion, Berkeley Mono actually looks more passable of the two. Something about the one on the right makes it look ethereal. Like it's behind the display. But don't let that detract from the fact that looking at code at 96 dpi is absolute garbage. Perhaps you're broke, in which case I retract my stupid comment. But if…

It’s only in the last decade that font designers stoped to care about low-dpi screens. Same for UI designers. It all started when those designers started to work on Retina screens.

It would be ok if the vast majority of screens were high dpi. But they are not. It’s not a question of being broke or not.

Affordable high-dpi screens are pretty much a recent thing. It keeps being rare (and expensive) on every laptop that isn’t a Mac.

Most companies bought hundreds of 1920*1080 screens in the last decade and they have no real incentive to throw them out of the window neither they feel the need to go 4K even when they buy new screens.

Good hi-dpi+multiscreen support on windows is no more recent than Windows 10 1703. On Linux it’s still garbage.

Millions of people are stuck working with low-dpi screens. It’s not like you have that much power over your employer to ask for a better screen without him changing the whole fleet because all your coworkers now wants one.

So I agree with you. In an ideal world, low-dpi should be something from the past. But it isn’t. And in our real world, the real shame is that designers (including font designers) stopped caring for the vast majority of people who don’t use a hi-dpi screen to work.

Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#72

Post by cosmotic »

tadfisher wrote: post #67
cosmotic wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vertical columns of background have, until ligatures, been a bullet proof means for brains to delineate characters. Is it possible to figure out with an increased cognitive load? Yes. Is it exactly as easy as without? No.

I'm confused, because I can delineate the characters in your comment fine, and this is with my browser's default sans-serif proportional typeface. I tend to read English text left-to-right, though, so if others are more comfortable reading top-to-bottom (or bottom-to-top, or middle-out), then my apologies.

I'm confused too. The comment was about ligatures in computer code, but did not itself contain computer code.

Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#73

Post by Barrin92 »

amake wrote: post #56
cosmotic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ligatures make code harder to read and harder to edit. It's not just personal preference, it's the science of usability. When I press backspace or cursor keys, I expect one glyph to be erased, not who-knows-how-many (half?!). Authors of content and programs with ligatures-by-default subject their readers and users to the penalty of ligatures. Some people like pain, but that doesn't mean we need pain switches on every…

> It's not just personal preference, it's the science of usability It's obviously personal preference, because many people prefer it. If I found ligatures harder to read or edit then I wouldn't use them, but I don't, so I do. > programs with ligatures-by-default Such as?

>If I found ligatures harder to read or edit then I wouldn't use them, but I don't, so I do

people likely prefer them for aesthetic reasons, just like they do certain color schemes, but there are objective answers in regards to legibility, and many people certainly use suboptimal setups. Lots of people code sitting hunched in front of their computer too, which is their personal preference, but also objectively bad for your neck.

Ligatures suffer from some straightforward objective issues, like being semantically wrong in certain cases. An inequality check should be a ligature, but in a literal string the character sequence is likely not intended to be subsituted. As such they create unecessary ambiguity, which is just bad.

Also they functionally don't have a reason to exist in monospaced fonts which are the norm in coding. given that The issue they're intended to address is overlapping characters.

Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#74

Post by cosmotic »

seanhunter wrote: post #70
cosmotic wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preferring it is personal preference. It being good or better is science. People prefer dark theme even though it's objectively harder to read because of the reduced contrast ratio, among other reasons.

Highly convenient that your preference is “science” whereas other people’s preference is just a preference. I’m not a ligatures fan myself but it seems completely arbitrary and don’t see at all how it’s scientific. You could convince me otherwise by posting some references to this science.

My preference is easier to read and edit. Readability and editability come with consistency, and that's science. Ligatures break the consistency.

Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#75

Post by manusachi »

whalesalad wrote: post #17

If you want excellent ligature support I would recommend Fira Mono. There are powerline variants, too. Lately I have been in love with IBM Plex Mono, but no ligature support.

I also like both of them. I use Fira Code (https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode) for code editor and IBM Plex Mono for terminal.

Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#76

Post by mcluck »

cosmotic wrote: post #64
amake wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not just personal preference, it's the science of usability It's obviously personal preference, because many people prefer it. If I found ligatures harder to read or edit then I wouldn't use them, but I don't, so I do. > programs with ligatures-by-default Such as?

Preferring it is personal preference. It being good or better is science. People prefer dark theme even though it's objectively harder to read because of the reduced contrast ratio, among other reasons.

You've shot yourself in the foot with your dark mode comment. It's not scientifically proven that dark mode is better than light mode or vice versa. It has been proven, as you mentioned, that contrast ratio is important. Contrast ratio is not dependent on if the background is dark or light. It's dependent on the comparison between the dark and light shades.

Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#77

Post by KronisLV »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #42
KronisLV wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I've stuck with free fonts most of the time. For programming, currently I tend to use: Liberation Mono: from the very same package of fonts that are included in LibreOffice, I find it to be surprisingly readable and easy on the eyes for most kinds of code or monospaced text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts PT Mono: while initially I really liked PT Sans and PT Serif separately (they're curre…

PT Mono was my goto for a long time. For the past few years I've been running Dank Mono[0]. The Liberation font don't look bad but their wideness as well as that of other common FOSS fonts like the Vera/Bitstream fonts has always bugged me for some reason. Whenever I do a fresh Linux install and the desktop is configured to use one of those I have to download and install Inter UI or Ubuntu Sans as the UI font for it…

> The Liberation font don't look bad but their wideness as well as that of other common FOSS fonts like the Vera/Bitstream fonts has always bugged me for some reason.

Ohh, that's a fair point. I guess it's very obvious in the comparison, when you look at something like Consolas and any of the others.

I've heard good things about Iosevka, when you care a lot about horizontal compactness: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/

Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#78

Post by eps »

nbk_2000 wrote: post #30
KronisLV wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I've stuck with free fonts most of the time. For programming, currently I tend to use: Liberation Mono: from the very same package of fonts that are included in LibreOffice, I find it to be surprisingly readable and easy on the eyes for most kinds of code or monospaced text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts PT Mono: while initially I really liked PT Sans and PT Serif separately (they're curre…

Same here, I try out a lot of monospace fonts as they come along. But Liberation Mono just scratches all my itches so well. I do however enjoy setting comments using fonts that aren't monospaced (which I begrudgingly acknowledge Comic Sans is actually decent for). At some point though the old typographers adage of "people read best, what they read most" must impact our preferences.

Try Averia for the comments.

In fact I would've loved to try a mono version of it if it were avaiable.

http://iotic.com/averia/

Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#79

Post by scns »

layer8 wrote: post #61
signa11 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you have not considered it before, check eizo ( https://www.eizo.com/home/ ) out. they make truly excellent displays.

None with the parameters I mentioned. To my knowledge currently only one JOLED panel (as used in the LG 27EP950) matches those specs, but it has poor availability, as they have yield issues (there are rumors JOLED may close shop), and it’s rather expensive. On the VA side, Samsung recently announced the M80C, which could fit the bill. LG announced the 27UQ850 with “IPS Black” technology, which I may take a look at, b…

This one fits the bill, on sale in China allready maybe you can order from there. Elsewhere from 4Q23.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/ViewSonic-VX2722-4K-OLED-27-in...

Re: Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release

#80

Post by scns »

pjerem wrote: post #71
helmholtz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1920x1200? 96 DPI?! Both those fonts look like absolute garbage, and how could they not? Only, in my opinion, Berkeley Mono actually looks more passable of the two. Something about the one on the right makes it look ethereal. Like it's behind the display. But don't let that detract from the fact that looking at code at 96 dpi is absolute garbage. Perhaps you're broke, in which case I retract my stupid comment. But if…

It’s only in the last decade that font designers stoped to care about low-dpi screens. Same for UI designers. It all started when those designers started to work on Retina screens. It would be ok if the vast majority of screens were high dpi. But they are not. It’s not a question of being broke or not. Affordable high-dpi screens are pretty much a recent thing. It keeps being rare (and expensive) on every laptop that…

> It’s only in the last decade that font designers stoped to care about low-dpi screens. Same for UI designers. It all started when those designers started to work on Retina screens.

A good designer would think about how his creation will be used in the Real World IMHO.

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