I'm generally pretty supportive of new typefaces, but this one strikes me as... not very legible.
The x-height is so uncommonly high it makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish between uppercase/ascending and lowercase letters at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'u', or 'h' vs. 'n'), and similarly the descender is so tiny it makes it hard to distinguish certain letters at a glance (e.g. 'q' vs 'p'). The whole point of large-enough ascenders and descenders is to recognize the shapes of whole words before looking at their letters, which these dimensions destroy.
The extremely square aspect of rounded segments similarly makes them harder to distinguish from straight segments at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'O' are far more similar than you want for legibility).
Not to mention, italic cursive is particularly difficult to read. Handwritten-style cursive was never designed for legibility -- it was designed for speed in writing. Adopting it in a body-text typeface meant for reading adds work for the reader to decipher it.
I don't want to be so negative, but typeface design has certain principles that the creator is simply ignoring. They're not arbitrary or aesthetic, but rather are directly about functional legibility.
At the end of the day, this typeface goes out of its way to be surprisingly difficult to read. You can read it, but it simply takes more effort. Which is generally the last thing you want in a typeface for coding (or anything body text).
I used victor mono as primary font everywhere (vscode, idea, terminal) for very long time, and disagree with your opinion of its readability. It successfully replaced Fira Code to me. Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I want to counter the authoritative tone of your comment.
Although I’m using Iosevka now, Victor Mono was reliable work horse for me for very long time.
I found that font through coding font tournament style selector (codingfont.com).
I may miss some, but my history was
Courier New - Consolas - Dejavu Sans Mono - Anonymous Pro - Azeret Mono - Fira Code - Victor Mono - Iosevka - Iosevka Slab, and if I will decide to go back, Victor Mono is going to be first choice
Typeface designer here. Thanks for trying the font and having lots of thoughts about it.
I guess the point is that it wasn’t first and foremost designed to follow as many font design principles as possible. If that’s what’s important to you, pick a font that follows as many of these principles as possible. :D
In the end, I guess I don’t really care whether I use 157ms to parse a sentence instead of 158 - although to me, the font is absolutely super-legible.
The roman style is pretty legible, yes, and I . The italic, though? It's not a 157ms vs 158ms difference, I legitimately struggle reading it at all, which is a shame because I really like the roman style.
Hey, thanks for designing it. Right now I'm using Iosevka but I loved Victor Mono, was my main terminal typeface for a long time, and I loved the high x-height which enhanced readability even at low sizes.
Even today it's one of my recommendations for anyone looking for a coding/monospace font.
I'm surprised you as a typeface designer are not interested in what end-users(aren't they the customers?) are saying about the font. This means, assuming good intent, that's not where the money is coming from.
Can someone shed some light on who pays typeface designers and what are the incentives like?
Hey that's the beautiful thing about being human, in my opinion :) we all prefer different things and that is OK! Otherwise, we wouldn't need menus at any restaurant since everyone would just get the same "food".
Fwiw I like the font and I'm looking forward to trying it out!
Well you made it explicitly for programming purposes.
I am not a poll house or a public opinion evaluator. But handwritten cursive and programming I wouldn't put in a same sentence.
The ligatures and the height you choose really don't go well with a lot of popular programming languages.
I'm not sure what aspect of programming do you believe is "inhumane" so you have desire to introduce "humanity" through design choice.
Verdana also has a high x-height, in fact for legibility, many road sign fonts have a high x-height as well. This font does have an unusually high x-height, but IMO its very well done. Capitals and lowercase are very distinct.
The cursive thing isn't my cup of tea, but there are oblique versions too.
Overall I think this font has a lot of character. Kudos to the designer, nice work!
To add to that, my expectation of fonts is that the italic version follows the same style as the non-italic version (same goes for bold).
Having a typewriter-like font whose italics version looks like handwritten cursive breaks this expectation. If it was meant for code comments, the solution is to configure the IDE to use a different font and not to hack the format.
Victor Mono is two fonts in a trenchcoat for no good reason.
I find the italic cursive very pleasing and not hard to read at all. It looks exactly like the worksheets I had in elementary school when learning how to write. My handwriting was never that neat but many people in my class had exactly this 'font' when writing. That was a long time ago...
Sorry, ligatures are not for me. I don't get it. Why would you ever want symbols to collapse like that in a functional monospace font? Just looks like a bunch of funky unicode characters peppered throughout my source. And my caret can travel _inside_ one of these special marks? No thanks.
I love ligatures, solely because I think they look pretty on my own screen. I especially like that our ASCII art arrows like -> are now little arrow pictures.
Emacs’s ligatures.el handles this nicely: you configure which specific ligatures you want to enable on a per-font basis. Want only -> and only in Berkeley Mono? Only turn that one on.
When pairing with people who use them, I find it harder to read, which is ok as long as variable names differ enough but it makes it really hard to distinguish == vs ===, and => vs -> etc...
I sometimes feels there's now a race between typefacers to stuff as many ligatures as possible to the point that it's bordering in indecipherability and clownishness. There's definitely an audience for this though, else why would they do it.
I think you've missed something from those comments.
Scenario: You're looking at a screenshot of someone else's code (from documentation, blog post, video, etc...). You see a ligature you're not familiar with. Now you cannot follow the rest of the information.
Does anyone know where the use of cursive-style characters in monospace fonts originated from? (My guess would be that it came from something like Operator Mono from Hoefler & Co.)
I've always found the cursive to be a little jarring, since the cursive characters usually look so different from the normal ones, and switching between cursive and normal styles makes it slower for me to visually parse a section of code. I always thought that was an odd choice given that many folks seem to highly value legibility and immediate character recognition when they pick a monospace font.
They are usually used for comments which people also configure to be less visible. They are sort of there when you want but do not attract attention. I suppose they also make comments look like regular prose, rather than "code".
It was a bit of a "novelty" font for typewriters. Almost like the Comic Sans of its day. It wasn't meant to be used as italics, it was for typing a fun invitation or more "personal" letter or something like that.
I can't find any information on it specifically though, whether it was the first. It wouldn't surprise me if it were, however.
You can compare using their tool if you scroll down that page. I also use Jetbrains Mono. A cursory comparison seems like Jetbrains is clearer. Look at $, but also other characters.
Cool typeface, but pretty illegible to me (I realize this is very personal). I don't think my eyes could handle this for more than a few minutes. That's the thing about typefaces — there are typefaces that are far "prettier" and more interesting than the ones I use, but they don't scale in the sense that they just can't be used as your daily driver. Good typefaces for all day programming strike a balance between style, legibility and "plainness" that makes them suitable for staring at all day every day.
I'm curious, does anybody else change their terminal/editor font about once every two months only to immediately decide."no I don't like change" and go back to their standard? (In my case JetBrains Mono)
I'd don't know if it's that I genuinely prefer that font, or just that I've spent so long looking at it my brain can't handle anything else.
Just happened to me too, I've tried some I found at https://www.programmingfonts.org/. I again returned to using Hasklig - Source Code pro with Ligatures - in the editor.
Readit News
The x-height is so uncommonly high it makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish between uppercase/ascending and lowercase letters at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'u', or 'h' vs. 'n'), and similarly the descender is so tiny it makes it hard to distinguish certain letters at a glance (e.g. 'q' vs 'p'). The whole point of large-enough ascenders and descenders is to recognize the shapes of whole words before looking at their letters, which these dimensions destroy.
The extremely square aspect of rounded segments similarly makes them harder to distinguish from straight segments at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'O' are far more similar than you want for legibility).
Not to mention, italic cursive is particularly difficult to read. Handwritten-style cursive was never designed for legibility -- it was designed for speed in writing. Adopting it in a body-text typeface meant for reading adds work for the reader to decipher it.
I don't want to be so negative, but typeface design has certain principles that the creator is simply ignoring. They're not arbitrary or aesthetic, but rather are directly about functional legibility.
At the end of the day, this typeface goes out of its way to be surprisingly difficult to read. You can read it, but it simply takes more effort. Which is generally the last thing you want in a typeface for coding (or anything body text).
Although I’m using Iosevka now, Victor Mono was reliable work horse for me for very long time.
I found that font through coding font tournament style selector (codingfont.com).
I may miss some, but my history was Courier New - Consolas - Dejavu Sans Mono - Anonymous Pro - Azeret Mono - Fira Code - Victor Mono - Iosevka - Iosevka Slab, and if I will decide to go back, Victor Mono is going to be first choice
I guess the point is that it wasn’t first and foremost designed to follow as many font design principles as possible. If that’s what’s important to you, pick a font that follows as many of these principles as possible. :D
In the end, I guess I don’t really care whether I use 157ms to parse a sentence instead of 158 - although to me, the font is absolutely super-legible.
Screenshot: https://dsc.cloud/cfce57/Screenshot-2023-11-19-at-9.31.58-PM...
>Thanks for trying the font and having lots of thoughts about it [...] In the end, I guess I don’t really care
Even today it's one of my recommendations for anyone looking for a coding/monospace font.
Can someone shed some light on who pays typeface designers and what are the incentives like?
Fwiw I like the font and I'm looking forward to trying it out!
Dead Comment
The ligatures and the height you choose really don't go well with a lot of popular programming languages.
I'm not sure what aspect of programming do you believe is "inhumane" so you have desire to introduce "humanity" through design choice.
The cursive thing isn't my cup of tea, but there are oblique versions too.
Overall I think this font has a lot of character. Kudos to the designer, nice work!
Having a typewriter-like font whose italics version looks like handwritten cursive breaks this expectation. If it was meant for code comments, the solution is to configure the IDE to use a different font and not to hack the format.
Victor Mono is two fonts in a trenchcoat for no good reason.
Dead Comment
Emacs’s ligatures.el handles this nicely: you configure which specific ligatures you want to enable on a per-font basis. Want only -> and only in Berkeley Mono? Only turn that one on.
When pairing with people who use them, I find it harder to read, which is ok as long as variable names differ enough but it makes it really hard to distinguish == vs ===, and => vs -> etc...
I don't see what these kinds of comments add. You see them in every discussion on a font that has them.
> I don't see what these kinds of comments add.
I think you've missed something from those comments.
Scenario: You're looking at a screenshot of someone else's code (from documentation, blog post, video, etc...). You see a ligature you're not familiar with. Now you cannot follow the rest of the information.
Question: What do you do?
Of course plenty of people far more experienced than me use them; they still look like clowns though.
I've always found the cursive to be a little jarring, since the cursive characters usually look so different from the normal ones, and switching between cursive and normal styles makes it slower for me to visually parse a section of code. I always thought that was an odd choice given that many folks seem to highly value legibility and immediate character recognition when they pick a monospace font.
http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html
It was a bit of a "novelty" font for typewriters. Almost like the Comic Sans of its day. It wasn't meant to be used as italics, it was for typing a fun invitation or more "personal" letter or something like that.
I can't find any information on it specifically though, whether it was the first. It wouldn't surprise me if it were, however.
I think we place a bit too much weight on how much font matter, but then again, I couldn't find one I liked, so I made my own, so who knows.
Are you expecting us to believe you when you had to create your own font?
I also like the play on Hamburgevons [1] for the examples--one of them is OldButSanePotus.
0: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburgevons
Considering what the world has come to, I'm not at all surprised that a font needs javascript.
I'd don't know if it's that I genuinely prefer that font, or just that I've spent so long looking at it my brain can't handle anything else.
It's unironically is the superior programming font if you have dyslexia. Makes an enormous difference in my reading speed.
If your editor or terminal has the option, increasing the tracking/space between letters in any sans-serif font can help with letter-flipping issues.
Disclaimer: I'm both mildly dyslexic and a more severe letter-flipper/mirror-writer (visual processing issues)[2] since childhood
1: https://www.boia.org/blog/does-comic-sans-benefit-people-wit...
2: https://www.understood.org/en/articles/faqs-about-reversing-...