So, if you're going to demonstrate the box drawing characters — and in a monospaced font, I would — they should line up?
E.g., under "lines", the rows are overlapping; https://i.imgur.com/KnOP2Wu.png ; I would think they're only supposed to just touch, with no gap, no overlap.
The boxes, similarly, don't quite line up right. https://i.imgur.com/6pVYh9a.png (Even the 100% box isn't lining up right, although somehow what FF screenshotted != what it rendered. sigh.) The point being, you want these to tile seamlessly. Oddly, they tile differently in the pictures-of-font that break up the page. (Which I'm not sure what they're supposed to be? One is called "5af1d7a5-fa60-4827-9b4f-808cdb635d59" and has no alt text. They remind me of Dwarf Fortress though.)
As other people hint, this seems like the line height is cramped. I/l/1 ambiguities is a deal breaker for any terminal font, though.
Number One, Pipe Character, lower case L, upper case I, zero and O, Parentheses and Brackets, are so common pain points on coding and terminal fonts. Those should be painfully distinct.
I've never understood why the lowercase l and 1 so often look the same in monospace fonts. It's not like anyone actually writes an l like that — why not just a small bottom right hook? And maybe a top left hook as well? But a whole base is insanity.
> I would think they're only supposed to just touch, with no gap, no overlap.
Because of variations on how software terminals and GUIs render fonts, this is very tricky. That’s why so many terminal programs take over box-drawing characters and implement the glyphs themselves. This way the glyphs defined by the font are a rendering failsafe and it’s sometimes better to not even implement them and leave it to the systems font substitution mechanisms.
Hardware terminals had fixed vertical spacing, which made alignment much easier.
Yeah it's driving me crazy honestly -- why put art on there if it's not recognizable as anything?? It does indeed look like the overworld from DF, but not quite coherent enough...
FWIW everyone's complaining about this so I'll throw in the recent monospace release that absolutely blew me away: https://monaspace.githubnext.com/ Who needs hackers when you have Microsoft the evil tech conglomerate pumping out fonts, anyway?
Another good Microsoft monospace font: Cascadia. Something about it just makes it super legible for me when coding in it, plus it has nerd fonts built in without needing to be patched.
To me the "art" blocks look like converted stills from a movie or TV show, or from existing artwork: two figures facing each other in the first, three figures in the second, a... galloping horse with a cloaked rider in the third? But I could be completely wrong on all of that.
For those commenting on the importance of character ambiguity, I completely agree, and offer "DP Sans Mono", a font specifically designed for unambiguous proofreading.
The line spacing is way too tight (this is line-spacing: 1).
Obviously that is beneficial for ASCII-art (smaller vertical gaps), but plain text would benefit from at least 1.1 and maybe 1.2.
I am not a typographer but the cap height of this font (I think it's the cap height) appears quite large, when perhaps it would be better to have a slightly smaller cap height so the ASCII-art features would work well at line-height 1.0 without the letters feeling so vertically cramped.
line spacing beyond minimal ought not be an attribute of a font. I can see a "recommended" line spacing for some type of "vertical as well as horizontal beauty", but drives me nuts when choosing a font also chooses scads of whitespace.
I like to squeeze a lot of info on a page, why do other people get to say "no". Sure, space out your wedding invitation, I can deal, but on the daily text on my screen, that should be up to me.
I do prefer "typewriter" fonts that are more squoze horizontally, this one seems to have loosened the ol belt a little, maybe for more "squareness".
For me it’s the weird mix of serifs and san-serif letters. Just off putting and weird it kind of feels like reading a note from a kidnapper made of clipped magazine letters pasted together.
I don't like it. As someone else pointed out, the line spacing is too tight and that might be part of it, but I feel like it is too heavy (thick? Something in between bold and regular, whatever that is called).
Yeah it's annoying in several fonts, not just that one. So I simply modify the font I'm using: one thing I do is I remove the lower left horizontal bar from lowercase 'l', that way it cannot be mistaken from a '1'.
Basically changing what's on the left to what's on the right:
*** ***
* *
* *
* *
***** ***
It's a little trick I've been using since so long I don't even remember since when I'm doing that.
Nitpick: the acknowledgements make a cute usage of "thy" and "thou hast". However, they actually refer to multiple individuals, and need to use "your" and "you have". Boring, and wrecks the aesthetic, I know...
I also highly recommend PragmataPro⁽¹⁾ if you prefer more characters per line. It’s €199 for the complete typeface, but well worth it for something you interact with for many hours per day, every day. More than 9000 characters have been hand-optimized
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E.g., under "lines", the rows are overlapping; https://i.imgur.com/KnOP2Wu.png ; I would think they're only supposed to just touch, with no gap, no overlap.
The boxes, similarly, don't quite line up right. https://i.imgur.com/6pVYh9a.png (Even the 100% box isn't lining up right, although somehow what FF screenshotted != what it rendered. sigh.) The point being, you want these to tile seamlessly. Oddly, they tile differently in the pictures-of-font that break up the page. (Which I'm not sure what they're supposed to be? One is called "5af1d7a5-fa60-4827-9b4f-808cdb635d59" and has no alt text. They remind me of Dwarf Fortress though.)
As other people hint, this seems like the line height is cramped. I/l/1 ambiguities is a deal breaker for any terminal font, though.
This one has those and a distinguishable zero vs. O, so far so good.
Whoops; someone pointed out that 1 and l are indistinguishable. That's a major failing.
https://imgur.com/a/N2tNaiO
although some characters still seem to be missing, most of them work as intended.
edit: nevermind, looks like it was using Lucida Sans instead! what is going on? does the OTF only include ASCII or something?
Because of variations on how software terminals and GUIs render fonts, this is very tricky. That’s why so many terminal programs take over box-drawing characters and implement the glyphs themselves. This way the glyphs defined by the font are a rendering failsafe and it’s sometimes better to not even implement them and leave it to the systems font substitution mechanisms.
Hardware terminals had fixed vertical spacing, which made alignment much easier.
FWIW everyone's complaining about this so I'll throw in the recent monospace release that absolutely blew me away: https://monaspace.githubnext.com/ Who needs hackers when you have Microsoft the evil tech conglomerate pumping out fonts, anyway?
https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/DP_Sans_Mono
https://www.pgdp.net/c/faq/font_sample.php
font download link at https://www.pgdp.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=70714
Obviously that is beneficial for ASCII-art (smaller vertical gaps), but plain text would benefit from at least 1.1 and maybe 1.2.
I am not a typographer but the cap height of this font (I think it's the cap height) appears quite large, when perhaps it would be better to have a slightly smaller cap height so the ASCII-art features would work well at line-height 1.0 without the letters feeling so vertically cramped.
Basically, slightly less-tall letters.
But as I say, not an expert.
I like to squeeze a lot of info on a page, why do other people get to say "no". Sure, space out your wedding invitation, I can deal, but on the daily text on my screen, that should be up to me.
I do prefer "typewriter" fonts that are more squoze horizontally, this one seems to have loosened the ol belt a little, maybe for more "squareness".
Basically changing what's on the left to what's on the right:
It's a little trick I've been using since so long I don't even remember since when I'm doing that.One of those minor nudges in life...
EDIT: and also a monospaced comment on hn to describe it :)
> Added missing symbols + - =
> Changed the top of 1 to distinguish from letters.
https://github.com/internet-development/www-server-mono/rele...
https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono/
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For something you look at the entire day? Every day? Seventy five bucks, once?
I have the full licence as I use this typeface professionally. It’s the best money I’ve ever spent.
[0] https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka