It probably took a lot of work to do so I'm not going to bash this... But somehow I feel that the letters are not round enough for my eyes to easily flow from one letter to the other. But then again I don't have the best eyes either so hopefully it's useful to some other devs.
First I scrolled past the Samples section and thought where can I see the font. I suggest to show a sample right at the top, there is enough space right next to the table of contents.
Thanks, it is always nice to see a monospaced font available. I especially like the light version. I also like the fact that symbols that look similar (e.g. "1lI") are very distinct from each others.
Including the comment I was about to type before I realized it had already been written:
"I hate to say this, but a font by a programmer makes as much sense as a database library by a font designer. Good font design is not about calculations or following principled rules; it's about what looks good to the eye, and it takes a tremendous amount of skill and experience.
And to my eye, at least, the font is incredibly difficult to read. It literally looks like a font designed by an engineer for a plotter, not something designed for the human eye or legibility.
Good fonts follow intuitive rhythms, they focus on word shapes (not just letter shapes), natural curves, there's a tremendous amount of subtlety that goes into achieving a proper sense of balance between letterforms, and a lot of things are actually different between letters/curves/etc. so that they look the same to the eye in the end. Even with "utilitarian" fonts like monospace ones.
"Carefully planned and calculated" is a great recipe for building a bridge, but not for building a font, unfortunately."
"Sorry if I come across as too negative -- I definitely 100% support people trying out new things." I just don't think that the byline "for programmers by programmers" is a good one. It was not meant to be an evaluation of the typeface itself.
Just curious, what would you say about this font sample: http://i.imgur.com/DSXqMCZ.png ? (It's a modification of Terminus, with smaller letter height to have a bit more whitespace between the lines)
Individual characters can be made out, but words are hard to read. Not enough separation between letters and symbols, so constructs like "(pred=%i)\t" are harder to visually parse. I'm also not a fan of aliased pixel fonts -- it really exacerbates the picket-fence effect while reading.
Here's what your code sample looks like in Source Code Pro:
Notice how all letters take up the full horizontal width so words clump together. It's easy to see that a space is a space, and not just an "i" next to an "l"
It's also worth noting that I had to try 3 separate OCR processors with your sample before I got one that didn't output complete garbage.
Thanks for such a great analysis! You pointed out some things I did not really think about. Especially the way Source Code Pro handles "i"s and "l"s.
I will try to add 1px of horizontal space between letters.
The goal was to make the font vertically compact, but still legible. The size is small and it feels quite clumped though.
In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, "font" is frequently synonymous with "typeface". In particular, the use of "vector" or "outline" fonts means that different sizes of a typeface can be dynamically generated from one design. Each style may still be in a separate "font file"—for instance, the typeface "Bulmer" may include the fonts "Bulmer roman", "Bulmer italic", "Bulmer bold" and "Bulmer extended"—but the term "font" might be applied either to one of these alone or to the whole typeface.
While I appreciate your semantic formalism, considering that my fonts are collected and managed in my Font Book rather than my Typeface book, I think you've lost that battle, for now.
Every time I learn about a new programmer font, I try it for a day. It makes me sad that I apparently will never find one I like better than Inconsolata.
While I like this (for reasons that others have already mentioned), the lack of an italic version is a bit of a killer for me, along with the lack of full latin-1 support.
Because to my eyes aren't trained, I really can't tell any font better than any other. I am mostly used to visual studio's default but I adopt to others equally efficiently without any real hindrance to my work.
So, anyone care to explain why a font is better than another or is it just a "feel" you get that you like one over the others?
Easy to read at small sizes so you can have a lot of code. 1 and i are not similar. 0 and O are different. Looks good as white on black (or bright on black anyway). Spacing between the letters is correct for use in code. Etc.
Tip for the one who created that font, display the font samples in an image or sample text immediately. All I care about is the looks. Did not immediately see where I could see an example so I just moved on to writing this feedback comment, and now I'm done with this post. Next!
No, you literally have to scroll down to the "below-the-fold" Samples section, read the terse description, and click in and out of several links to see samples.
Point is: the very first thing anyone going to that page to see that font is going to want to see is that font. Most are going to expect the text of the page in that font, or at least a suitable sample first. As is, the text seen is in some non-standard (AFAIK) font which piques interest as the reader studies its subtleties, wondering how code would look in it ... then after a nontrivial time reading, discovered the links to samples, and is startled to see something completely different (and, IMHO, kinda "squashed").
A newspaper doesn't put the #1 headline on a page referenced below-the-fold.
I see this issue a lot when people try to show off their projects. "Check out my new gui/platform/product/application/plugin - If you are interesting in seeing it visually, simply fork my repo, step through the install, and get it running locally."
The phrase "A font for programmer, by a programmer" is a disservice to the many fine folks at Adobe and elsewhere who manage to not only be type designers, but also programmers. There's a lot of code that goes into making a good font. (Little known fact: Just van Rossum, type designer and programmer, is the brother of the Python BDFL Guido van Rossum.)
All that to say, Adobe's Source Code Pro could also be called a font for programmers, by programmers.
I know that a sans-serif font looks all slick and modern, but those serifs in Courier New help your eye identify the character more readily and improve readability. Any monospace font without serifs is automatically a no-go for me when it comes to programming.
I find the rounded r's and n's a little bit difficult to negotiate, especially at smaller point sizes - while aesthetically pleasing, it makes the font harder to read. When I program, I want all my neurons available to coding. Also, the horizontal bar in f is on a different height than the one on the t. This makes it noisy.
Having said that, I applaud a developer committed enough to make "the perfect editor font" just as much as I applaud those who, via their config scripts and plugins, shape vim or emacs into their own perfect text editors.
Pages about fonts should be written in the target font. On that note, what font is the page about the font in? I wish there were a fixed-width version of that font.
The one thing that jumped out at me is that I find the parentheses too strongly curved, so much so it may be difficult to distinguish between '(' and 'C'.
It's hard to tell because there are no 'C's in the samples; more upper case and mixed case text would be helpful.
It seems to me that he has gone to enormous lengths to use consistent pieces to make letters (as befits a programmer -- DRY design), which makes them all look very samish, hurting readability. I think a better approach would be to figure out how to make the glyphs seem more distinct without being inconsistent or ugly.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 68.0 ms ] threadFor instance, I prefer Menlo font and find it much better looking than Hermit.
Tried others (including this one), but keep coming back to it. I have it set to 14pt in Sublime Text.
Including the comment I was about to type before I realized it had already been written:
"I hate to say this, but a font by a programmer makes as much sense as a database library by a font designer. Good font design is not about calculations or following principled rules; it's about what looks good to the eye, and it takes a tremendous amount of skill and experience. And to my eye, at least, the font is incredibly difficult to read. It literally looks like a font designed by an engineer for a plotter, not something designed for the human eye or legibility. Good fonts follow intuitive rhythms, they focus on word shapes (not just letter shapes), natural curves, there's a tremendous amount of subtlety that goes into achieving a proper sense of balance between letterforms, and a lot of things are actually different between letters/curves/etc. so that they look the same to the eye in the end. Even with "utilitarian" fonts like monospace ones. "Carefully planned and calculated" is a great recipe for building a bridge, but not for building a font, unfortunately."
My response to your quote had also already been written, isn't this a convenient day?
Here's what your code sample looks like in Source Code Pro:
http://i.imgur.com/uAknyGB.png
Smaller font:
http://i.imgur.com/m0p17tm.png
Notice how all letters take up the full horizontal width so words clump together. It's easy to see that a space is a space, and not just an "i" next to an "l"
It's also worth noting that I had to try 3 separate OCR processors with your sample before I got one that didn't output complete garbage.
I will try to add 1px of horizontal space between letters. The goal was to make the font vertically compact, but still legible. The size is small and it feels quite clumped though.
"Fonts" are computer code. Typefaces are what you see, unless you're editing the font that will set the type on your screen.
In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, "font" is frequently synonymous with "typeface". In particular, the use of "vector" or "outline" fonts means that different sizes of a typeface can be dynamically generated from one design. Each style may still be in a separate "font file"—for instance, the typeface "Bulmer" may include the fonts "Bulmer roman", "Bulmer italic", "Bulmer bold" and "Bulmer extended"—but the term "font" might be applied either to one of these alone or to the whole typeface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font
While I appreciate your semantic formalism, considering that my fonts are collected and managed in my Font Book rather than my Typeface book, I think you've lost that battle, for now.
Yes, that's right. An open source font by Adobe. It's absolutely gorgeous!
[0]: https://mozilla.github.io/Fira/
If you haven't seen it yet, Fantasque Sans Mono (formerly Cosmic Sans Neue) is my current favourite. It's worth checking out. http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono
So, anyone care to explain why a font is better than another or is it just a "feel" you get that you like one over the others?
Point is: the very first thing anyone going to that page to see that font is going to want to see is that font. Most are going to expect the text of the page in that font, or at least a suitable sample first. As is, the text seen is in some non-standard (AFAIK) font which piques interest as the reader studies its subtleties, wondering how code would look in it ... then after a nontrivial time reading, discovered the links to samples, and is startled to see something completely different (and, IMHO, kinda "squashed").
A newspaper doesn't put the #1 headline on a page referenced below-the-fold.
screenshot https://mediacru.sh/ce42e42abe27
All that to say, Adobe's Source Code Pro could also be called a font for programmers, by programmers.
Having said that, I applaud a developer committed enough to make "the perfect editor font" just as much as I applaud those who, via their config scripts and plugins, shape vim or emacs into their own perfect text editors.
Also, he managed to make his font work on WIndows. I never did it with mine (https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font)
my eyes hurt :-)
It's hard to tell because there are no 'C's in the samples; more upper case and mixed case text would be helpful.
Screenshot: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/3a95a8a8-978a-4371-8411...
Why not do:
https://github.com/daylerees/colour-schemes it's "Frontier Contrast"
http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/shots.html