Programming

17024 readers

174 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

296

Monaspace - Microsoft presents a new font family for code (monaspace.githubnext.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

79 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Eh I don't really buy the noticeable argument. Either it's not noticeable both ways (doesn't matter that m is squished all the time) or it's not noticeable both ways (expanding m doesn't align and it's noticeable and annoying).

Optical Illusion

~~Wait no, its the fault of the stretching! I mean yes, the i's are the same hight (which is shocking, thank you for correcting us on that) but the reason it's an optical illusion is because the i on the left is wider and wide m exaggerates the thinness of the i on the right! Turn off the stretching and suddenly the i's look the same height.~~

Edit: I see someone else already pointed this out

This is what I meant by "feeling like my editor is gaslighting me"