That's an interesting license, and very nice of course.
I got a bit confused, my initial reading and interpretation was that the intent is to have the actual font used in charity and relief efforts, I guess in signage. That's probably not what the author meant, though.
It doesn't appear so, but that would be a great 3rd option. Send in your charity registration, and get a free licence to use the font in your charities branding. That could serve to both help charities and build more awareness around the font, creating more sales, and more proceeds. You should mention it to them.
Really nice and clean. Would prefer it if it included cyrillic characters and more latin ones to cover all European languages (e.g. Polish ł is missing, Czech š, č and probably several Hungarian letters).
I also don't see the warning. Toss your domains into Google webmaster central if you haven't, it'll give you info if it actually arises (and is just generally a good practice.)
I use Jekyll that generates a static html site. The only third party stuff I have on that page is a MailChimp-widget. So, I'll wait and see what Google webmaster tools will tell me.
- the difference between uppercase and lowercase is too low making camelCase very hard to read
- the colon is aligned to the left of its space making ":=" look horrible
- "$" is hard to distinguish from "S"
- [] have funny vertical alignment
- every char is a bit wider than it should, wasting a lot of horizontal screen estate - what you want to avoid when working with 3+ columns of code on one screen
Bad compared even to Ubuntu Mono. Very bad compared to Source Code Pro. Horrible compared to Consolas.
But looks good on titles of articles referencing charity :) Seems like the intended use for a monospace font... right?
It wasn't designed for code. It was more a educational project for me to learn interpolation to "easily" create several weights of the font based on two weights. At the same time I was looking for ways to help out in any way I could with the ongoing situation re refugees here in Europe.
The "code" thing I thought was a bonus, and you're totally right. It might not work that well for code and it was never intended to compete with fonts that are intended to be used for code.
Again, I'm super grateful for you feedback and will take a look at the examples of strange looking glyphs that you pointed out. Thanks a million!
I think the only upper/lower case issue I have is with K--I think the other letters are fine.
About the colon: In many cases in typesetting, shifting the colon to the left looks better, but not always. In TeX, there's ':' for ordinary colon and \colon for the left-shifted colon. Anyway, I guess it isn't a totally absurd choice if they're really trying to target a use other than code.
I agree about $/S.
I'm not sure what you're seeing with the vertical alignment of [], they look fine to me.
More criticisms as a code font:
At the size I'd be using for code, ` is nearly indistinguishable from '.
If any font maker read this. I would like to have a "bitmap" monospace font as a true type font in the same size as Consolas 15px.
With "bitmap" I mean high contrast super crisp, pixel perfect, that don't lose contrast without sub-pixel-antailias.
Crispness was one of my primary motivations for learning to make my own programming font, Luculent [1][2]. Consolas is wider so the proportions aren't quite the same. But mine is superhinted to look good with no or limited antialiasing at 15 ppem, among other sizes.
I totally agree to that! Never really thought this educational experiment would be featured on HN. It has kinda blown up! I'm glad you took a gander though!
Bad news: you cannot download the font (the supplied URL, when clicked, first goes to gumroad.com then to cloudfront.net which gives the error: Safari cannot open the page).
It's disturbing that the landing page does not mention at all what charity procedes go to. You need to go to the very bottom of the About page to finally find it's for http://www.unhcr.org
The donation is also done in a sketchy way. Also near the bottom of the About page:
> How does this charity thing work?
> So far I'm using a solution that means I get payments sent to me to my Paypal and I personally make the donations to charities. I've chosen this way because it's easy.
In other words, you're paypal'ing money to a stranger and hope that the money makes it's way to charity
To the author's defense, he does have a "Are you to be trusted?" section that acknowledges this. The idea of a pay-what-you-like-for-charity-on-my-side-project idea is neat, but you need some degree of credibility or third-party to make it work. The next side project should be integrating against something that guarantees the promise of the donations.
It's a leap of faith, most definitely, and maybe a bit shady when viewed from an outsiders perspective. Just give money to a stranger? Yes. Shady indeed, I agree.
But then again, if you chose to pay for it, which is your choice - you could download it for free - you actually get a font in five weights that has taken me a lot of time to craft.
It's your choice. But you can trust me. It's the Internet - people wouldn't lie on the internet, no?
And - I'll be the first to agree that this project needs more credibility and/or third-party involvement. I've already gotten the ball rolling on some partnerships with third parties for the future. Getting Hacker News'd wasn't even on my horizon. Superexciting! I was expecting friends and family to support this, like on my other design/charity project that I mention and link to on the about page.
The pages do not tell me what I would be paying for. For me, it's important to know what font file format is used, because I need to know what and how many hoops I would have to jump through in order to obtain vt fonts. (Best outcome is two vt fonts: one normal+bold, one light+demibold. This is why the multiple weights interested me in the first place.)
31 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 25.4 ms ] threadI got a bit confused, my initial reading and interpretation was that the intent is to have the actual font used in charity and relief efforts, I guess in signage. That's probably not what the author meant, though.
I use Jekyll that generates a static html site. The only third party stuff I have on that page is a MailChimp-widget. So, I'll wait and see what Google webmaster tools will tell me.
- the difference between uppercase and lowercase is too low making camelCase very hard to read
- the colon is aligned to the left of its space making ":=" look horrible
- "$" is hard to distinguish from "S"
- [] have funny vertical alignment
- every char is a bit wider than it should, wasting a lot of horizontal screen estate - what you want to avoid when working with 3+ columns of code on one screen
Bad compared even to Ubuntu Mono. Very bad compared to Source Code Pro. Horrible compared to Consolas.
But looks good on titles of articles referencing charity :) Seems like the intended use for a monospace font... right?
It wasn't designed for code. It was more a educational project for me to learn interpolation to "easily" create several weights of the font based on two weights. At the same time I was looking for ways to help out in any way I could with the ongoing situation re refugees here in Europe.
The "code" thing I thought was a bonus, and you're totally right. It might not work that well for code and it was never intended to compete with fonts that are intended to be used for code.
Again, I'm super grateful for you feedback and will take a look at the examples of strange looking glyphs that you pointed out. Thanks a million!
About the colon: In many cases in typesetting, shifting the colon to the left looks better, but not always. In TeX, there's ':' for ordinary colon and \colon for the left-shifted colon. Anyway, I guess it isn't a totally absurd choice if they're really trying to target a use other than code.
I agree about $/S.
I'm not sure what you're seeing with the vertical alignment of [], they look fine to me.
More criticisms as a code font:
At the size I'd be using for code, ` is nearly indistinguishable from '.
At the size I'd be using for code, @ is just an odd circle-ish glyph (though I love it at larger sizes). And at small sizes it can be hard or impossible to distinguish it from © (I don't think you have ©, I think it's falling back to a different font).
[1] http://eastfarthing.com/luculent [2] https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent
To my taste, it's a bit too dense for regular coding. Very nice for diffing/merging and for console.
Bad news: you cannot download the font (the supplied URL, when clicked, first goes to gumroad.com then to cloudfront.net which gives the error: Safari cannot open the page).
I use it everywhere, including Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu, usually in an 11 point size.
I settled on this font while trying numerous monospaced fonts: everything I could get my hands on. Boy was I surprised at how I overlooked Consolas.
The donation is also done in a sketchy way. Also near the bottom of the About page:
> How does this charity thing work?
> So far I'm using a solution that means I get payments sent to me to my Paypal and I personally make the donations to charities. I've chosen this way because it's easy.
In other words, you're paypal'ing money to a stranger and hope that the money makes it's way to charity
To the author's defense, he does have a "Are you to be trusted?" section that acknowledges this. The idea of a pay-what-you-like-for-charity-on-my-side-project idea is neat, but you need some degree of credibility or third-party to make it work. The next side project should be integrating against something that guarantees the promise of the donations.
But then again, if you chose to pay for it, which is your choice - you could download it for free - you actually get a font in five weights that has taken me a lot of time to craft.
It's your choice. But you can trust me. It's the Internet - people wouldn't lie on the internet, no?
And - I'll be the first to agree that this project needs more credibility and/or third-party involvement. I've already gotten the ball rolling on some partnerships with third parties for the future. Getting Hacker News'd wasn't even on my horizon. Superexciting! I was expecting friends and family to support this, like on my other design/charity project that I mention and link to on the about page.
The pages do not tell me what I would be paying for. For me, it's important to know what font file format is used, because I need to know what and how many hoops I would have to jump through in order to obtain vt fonts. (Best outcome is two vt fonts: one normal+bold, one light+demibold. This is why the multiple weights interested me in the first place.)
* https://freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt
* https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons#Font_Support
There's also no information about the character repertoire. Does it have everything in the WGL4? Or the W1G? Or less than either? What does it have?