Monaspace
monaspace.githubnext.com
An innovative superfamily of fonts for code
  • codemonk@programming.dev
    12·
    1 year ago

    Technically, font healing is a neat idea. It fails for text that does not meat its requirements, i.e. two ‘m’ next to each other. Depending on the characters around them, this might create two different ‘m’.

    This is unavoidable, of course. The only solution are proportional fonts. So font healing is a nice idea. It creates a more consistent spacing at the price of less consistent glyphs. Whether one likes this compromise, is a matter of taste. I personally lean towards consistent glyphs, but I did not try it for an extended period.

    • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
      3·
      1 year ago

      I’m not sure I’d consider that “failing”. At first glance, I don’t mind the distinct “m” glyphs being juxtaposed. But perhaps I’d find it annoying after a while.

      • codemonk@programming.dev
        1·
        1 year ago

        Maybe ‘failing’ is too strong. What I mean is that in situations like the one I showed, texture healing cannot solve the problem of uneven texture. Not that they claimed it does. It just eases the problem. I like to know the trade-offs. When does it provide an improvement and when not? What tensions does that create?

        From a users point of view, I do not know if it ‘fails’ or not. I totally agree with you. Maybe the I would find to distinct ‘m’ glyphs annoying, maybe not. And example emphasizes the ‘problem’. Maybe, I woukd even notice while coding or writing. To know that, I need to try. I just like to know the trade-offs in advance.

        • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
          1·
          1 year ago

          When reading the announcement post, I was indeed hoping they’d include an example word with two "m"s in a row, so I was glad to see the example here. I don’t mind it, but it does feel almost dishonest to exclude that case from their post.

          • codemonk@programming.dev
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yeah, I am always happy if a project not only mentions where it shines but also where it does not. But it is common practice not to do so. Same in academic publishing. Everybody is focused on selling oneself, it seems.

    • jadero@programming.dev
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’ve long preferred proportional fonts and positional tab stops like what you find in a WYSIWYG word processor. Got a tab position wrong? Drag it as appropriate or, if necessary, add a new one. In fact, during a period where I was doing far more writing than programming, in the days before code completion, I preferred my WYSIWYG word processor to my code editor. I had appropriate scripts and macros for cleaning up imported text files and to always save both native format and a text file with spaces in place of tabs. I also had different templates for different languages so that I could have custom processing for different languages. (It helps that a big part of that job was teaching people how to use word processors as far more than just electronic typewriters.)

      Now, of course, the programmer’s editor is an advanced tool tailored to the job, making it lunacy to even consider a word processor as code editor. Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t word processing concepts that might be valuable.

      Nick Gravgaard has some good writing on the subject and links to a variety of resources, including to at least one proportional font designed for programming.

      • codemonk@programming.dev
        2·
        1 year ago

        Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I started with WYSIWYG and did not like editing with proportional fonts. Things do not align, the cursor jumps around and movements have variable distances. But I much prefer looking at beautifully typesetted proportional font (e.g. with LaTeX). While I think, monospaced font are nice for editing, they are okayish to look at.

        Thanks for the link. I will look into it and maybe try proportional for coding once more. Another idea I really like are almost proportional fonts. Read about these fonts a few month ago. So far I haven’t tried them.

        • jadero@programming.dev
          1·
          1 year ago

          I’m just getting back into programming as a retirement hobby after leaving the field due to burnout 15 years ago. That means I’m only just starting to figure out editors and such.

          I don’t know of any code editors that use tab stops the way a word processor does. A word processor uses tab stops specifically for alignment at defined positions rather than tab characters equivalent to specific number of spaces (or tab key to insert specific number of spaces). Without the ability to set positional tab stops, I don’t know that proportional fonts will be all that great for most people.

          I took a look at your link to almost proportional fonts. Thanks. I don’t know how I missed that, given that iA Writer is one of the editors I’ve been playing with for general purpose writing. (I’ve become disillusioned with the state of modern word processors.)

  • muhanga@programming.dev
    6·
    1 year ago

    And sadly one more font I will never be able to use due to missing support of non-latin characters.

    Sadly some features are nice.

    • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
      4·
      1 year ago

      You’d think after that page of “texture healing”, alignment, etc. etc., Microsoft would actually make a fully, complete font first and foremost…

      • muhanga@programming.dev
        1·
        1 year ago

        And release zip contains a _MACOSX folder which is a clear indication of sloppiness and/or rushed release. … and ligatures don’t work out the box in JetBrains product IDEs.

        And if only they slapped beta on this there will be not problem what so ever…

        • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          The ligatures don’t even work in visual studio. It made me look for a different font with ligatures, landed on fira code for now. But hyphenated ligatures just seen outright broken on VS and have been for a good amount of years. Think it’s time to change IDEs soon. Might try and get VS Code to act more like it’s counterpart at some point.

  • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
    4·
    1 year ago

    I like all of it, except for that awful “texture healing”. Imagine having words above & below like

    i=mins
w=maxs

    But the m’s just slightly don’t line up because the top one is wider than the bottom one. I’d feel like my editor was gaslighting me 🤢

    • OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      Here’s your code example in the editor. I don’t personally think the difference between the 'm’s is super noticable. But what did strike me a lot more is the difference in height between the two 'i’s in the first line. I think that difference is pretty bad.

      • murtaza64@programming.dev
        3·
        1 year ago

        It looks like it’s not an actual height difference, but the smaller width makes the second i look significantly smaller than the first, also implying a lower height.

        • OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org
          3·
          1 year ago

          True, they are the exact same height. Holy optical illusion, Batman!

          I suppose this is part of what makes font design so difficult.

        • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
          2·
          1 year ago

          Welp, another reason I will absolutely not be using glyph-streching or whatever Microsoft called it.

      • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        thanks for rendering that! and yeah that height difference is really weird. That almost seems like a bug.

        Also Idk if the ='s make the m smaller or bigger.

        If the streching is so small as to be unnoticable (and I agree it’s pretty subtle) then I also don’t really understand the benefit.

        • OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org
          3·
          1 year ago

          If the streching is so small as to be unnoticable (and I agree it’s pretty subtle) then I also don’t really understand the benefit.

          Typically, the idea behind this sort of design is that it should be unnoticeable. The motivation is that, with other monospace fonts, the differences in character width, along with the inconsistent spacing and line thicknesses are both noticable and distracting. Some of this badness is avoidable, and this is what this font attempts.

          and yeah that height difference is really weird. That almost seems like a bug.

          I’ve been informed, (and had to double check because I didn’t believe it,) that the two "i"s are actually the exact same height. The first looking larger than the second is an optical illusion. Font design is hard.

    • wethegreenpeople@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      1 year ago

      They would still line up, wouldn’t they? Or am I misunderstanding how the texture healing would work… Would they not take the same total amount of space?

  • admiralteal@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    I still like Fira Code better. These are really nice and if there was a fast and easy way to implement fonts to my syntax highlighting maybe I’d give it more of a spin, but that seems really annoying to set up and baseline I don’t find any of these easier to read than Fira.

      • Patches@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        1 year ago

        Does MonoLisa support all the proper symbols like not equal? Less than equal to? Greaten than or equal to? I love that feature when writing code. It makes it so much easier to understand imo.

  • murtaza64@programming.dev
    3·
    1 year ago

    I love the idea of using multiple font faces at the same time while looking at code. I wonder if (hope?) terminals will one day soon support switching fonts with control sequences… Would be pretty awesome!

  • Bruno Finger@lemm.ee
    2·
    1 year ago

    The fonts are nice but I absolutely hate the “copilot voice” text moving around idea, it’s absolutely terrible to read.

    • JakenVeina@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think the intention is that Copilot voice would be animated, I think they just had a dumb idea to highlight it that way in the demo. Look closely, and you’ll see the Copilot voice is the only text there written in the “Krypton” font. The animation indeed looks godawful.

  • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    1 year ago

    Hmm nothing really jumped out at me at first glance, I don’t mind the ligature stuff, but also love monospace for the aesthetic.

    But I am glad they’re experimenting with this stuff. Ive always wanted a sarcastica font, we’re almost there with sArCAsm. But it’s a pain to write :)

    • Die4Ever@programming.dev
      2·
      1 year ago

      Texture healing works by finding each pair of adjacent characters where one wants more space, and one has too much. Narrow characters are swapped for ones that cede some of their whitespace, and wider characters are swapped for ones that extend to the very edge of their box. This swapping is powered by an OpenType feature called “contextual alternates,” which is widely supported by both operating systems and browser engines.

      Contextual alternates are normally used for certain scripts, like Arabic, where the shape of each glyph depends on the surrounding glyphs. And they are also used for cursive handwriting fonts where the stroke of the “pen” might have different connection points across letters. Texture healing is a novel application of this technology to code.

      basically fonts were already capable of using alternate versions of characters based on their nearby characters, so they used that for these fonts to allow for seemingly-dynamic sizing/spacing

  • simonced@lemmy.oneEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Looks nice, I’ll try it today and see how it goes. At least MS doing something good for a change…unless they added spyware to a font!? LOL

  • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    The only font I’m interested in for Code is one that has ligatures. Otherwise I’m fine with whatever.

    • Rogue@feddit.uk
      2·
      1 year ago

      What do you like about ligatures? I disable them straight away. To me it just seems to add an unnecessary level of complexity to the experience