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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

#91

Post by sayyadirfanali »

crazygringo wrote: post #77
sayyadirfanali wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it might be useful to put some screenshots of other fonts on your page, to show what symbol or alignment problems yours corrects. Because I've studied a lot of typeface design, and I can't really figure out what you're doing, what pain points you're trying to address. Because when you say "and $, @, % seem ever mismatched?", I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. I certainly am curious tho…

thanks for the suggestion. i'd think about adding screenshots of other fonts.

about the alignment, i think the README might give an impression that it's solely about vertical alignment, but it's more about uniform flow of characters along with some resemblance with an actual symbol (which we can not have in ASCII).

for example, take the `Myna is my attempt to break some of these conventions to make things look a little bit even for programmers.

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

#92

Post by sayyadirfanali »

agarttha wrote: post #28
sayyadirfanali wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i know the title can be a bit misleading but Myna is primarily ASCII. languages which insist on using full Unicode like APL and Agda have bigger problems (availability of uniform glyphs and inconsistency with monospace design) on their plates. which imo is one reason why full Unicode editing hasn't really caught up. Myna doesn't use any ligatures though. it would run on almost all terminals and editors.

What about a J example? https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/NuVoc

good idea. since i don't code in J, can you supply a 2-3 line quintessential J example to demonstrate this?

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

#93

Post by sayyadirfanali »

theultdev wrote: post #63
sayyadirfanali wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i use this font basically everywhere and have become kinda blind to the defects. for me it looked best when glyphs are mostly centered (which makes them "genuinely monospace" if you catch my drift). but you raise a valid point. it is not entirely subjective. some obviously grotesque (no pun) kerning would need to be changed in the next version. if you can point out some obvious ones i would urge you to create an issu…

Looks beautiful! Have you done any focus on Typescript by chance? I will test it out and report any abnormalities I see!

thanks! in TypeScript, i've not noticed any glaring combination mismatches. i think most common combinations are covered by considering C and Perl. but feel free to try and report them if you find any.

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

#94

Post by sayyadirfanali »

iambvk wrote: post #87

My favorite monospace font is "Ubuntu Mono" for ages. As an engineer, I like to see -- for the lack of better word -- some taste instead of characters being too formal and too symmetric. Ubuntu and Ubuntu-Mono satisfy this to a good extent without being too much, like in comic sans. The closest font with similar taste, which I found recently is Mononoki

Ubuntu Mono is great. many glyphs in Myna are directly borrowed from Ubuntu Mono, just more condensed and better aligned.

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

#96

Post by sayyadirfanali »

jijojv wrote: post #30

Looks great except for l looking like 1

thanks for the feedback. i didn't think about it until a few people commented here. if you use it and want it changed, please open a feature request. just like the curly braces, a disambiguating variant of Myna can be issued in the next release. i gather removing the left stroke at the bottom of the `l` would fix it for you. i think changing the `1` won't make sense as that's how it always is.

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

#97

Post by sayyadirfanali »

binary132 wrote: post #83

I really appreciate that the symbols are clear and well-aligned but I do not find the font very attractive or legible unfortunately. I like the Go Mono font though so maybe it’s a “me” problem. :)

thanks for the feedback. i'd like to think it's just a preference issue.

i didn't know about Go Mono. it looks alright but monospace serifs are probably not for me.

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

#98

Post by sayyadirfanali »

kccqzy wrote: post #69
fph wrote: post #26

The Latex example should include at least a math formula.

And the Haskell example doesn't even include common operators like or or . I would've also expected some fancier arrows like = >>.

if you're looking for those Haskell operators, you'd find them in the huge banner at the start. maybe i should also add them in the illustrations too.

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

#100

Post by sayyadirfanali »

thetwentyone wrote: post #36

Also see the JuliaMono typeface: https://juliamono.netlify.app It was designed to be a comprehensive monocode typeface to support Julia's full Unicode support.

thanks for pointing it out. i mostly program in ASCII range. Myna covers a reasonable subset of Unicode but one can indeed use Julia as a fallback for Myna to cover Unicode if one wishes.
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