The way they talk about it makes it sound like they invented the written word, but that notwithstanding the fonts actually look really nice in my opinion.
People actually change fonts in their IDE? I’ve always used whatever the default is and never even thought about it.
Love Fira Code but recently switched to https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ and it’s equally great.
What makes this unique is that they’re saying this allows for different fonts in the same piece of code. So you could have comments in one font, your code in another, AI written code in another, etc. Looks like all the fonts are the same size, so everything still aligns nicely.
some people even change default system fonts used in the deskop environment (menu’s, filemanager etc) 😎😁
I’ve always preferred IBM’s Plex Mono, specifically the Nerd Fonts version.
Calling it now, Radon will become the new Comic Sans.
Honestly I could see radon for comments only. It makes it clear that it’s a comment by the font alone.
Yeah, I looked at the first couple of fonts, then read all that stuff about readability this, state of the art that, expressive palettes la-di-da and I thought “ok maybe they have an idea here”.
Then I looked at the rest of the examples and ran into that… thing. Like, the fucker’s so aggressively irritating to read that you could use that font to hide eg. backdoors in code, and reviewers would instinctively skip over those parts just to avoid the pain.
I mean, Comic Code is pretty damn good.
That was interesting how they adjusted sizes based on adjacent letters. Good idea
Great idea but the name texture healing is terrible. It’s not healing anything and there are no textures with fonts. Dynamic or flexible weight makes a lot more sense.
I agree that texture healing is a bit too vague about that they’re really using it for. Its really for kerning pair without disrupting the monospaced grid. Maybe, since the audience for these fonts aren’t usually typographers, they should have called it Monospaced Kerning Pairs?
Texture is a term and feature of typefaces in design however. Usually described for fonts used in body text, or larger blocks of text.
While it probably doesn’t affect shorter lines of text used in most coding languages, it can be harder to read when smaller sizes are used. Monospaced MmWw are the worst culprits.
One memorable observation on typographic texture was made by Heinz Peyer, a Swiss poet, who said that reading a text composed in Helvetica was like walking through a field of stones, whereas reading a text in Syntax was like walking through a field of flowers. (23)
Form is often susceptible to logical analysis, and pattern somewhat so, but texture evades precise description because its repetitions are so numerous, its features so small, and its interactions so refined, that the multifarious complexity of the emergent image resists orderly analysis. Texture requires a holistic more than an analytic under standing.
Ironically the second paragraph is turning out to be largely incorrect with smarter ways to analyze blocks of typeface texture. Also this second paragraph nicely illustrates the utter wankery present in a lot of typography circles and analysis.
Gotta justify that grad school bill somehow (pun intended).
Edited for spelling
Too bad I’m married to JetBrains Mono.
Does anyone know if Jetbrains Mono also does the whole dynamic width thing?
I like Hack as my font of choice, but I will probably give this a shot. It’s a font, there is no risk of data collection, Microsoft style bugs, or other Microsoft-associated product issues.
It’s a font, there is no risk of data collection…
TeamViewer checks for a font their app installs when visiting their website to fingerprint you.
In my web browser I personally use uBlock Origin to just block all remote fonts and browse with a JS disabled by default policy. It’s an annoying but necessary compromise, in my opinion.
Also, in Firefox v118 a new feature was introduced to curtail the font fingerprint route as well: “The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts to mitigate font fingerprinting in Private Browsing windows.”
I’m sure you know this, but for anyone else scrolling through the comments it is actually ridiculous how much data websites can query and receive to fingerprint users from the web browser. Just look at https://amiunique.org – “WHY IS THIS ALLOWED?” is the question I have asked for many years now.
“WHY IS THIS ALLOWED?” is the question I have asked for many years now.
Because people want to have features in their web browsers and originally no one really designed the web with security in mind.
Fuck me sideways.
Also, I’d remove battery charge metric from the fingerprint. Since it changes over time, I wouldn’t really consider it a good or even usable metric.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/91347/how-can-a-font-be-used-for-privilege-escalation
Not a serious rebuttal. But yes, MS has found a way for Windows to be vulnerable to attacks using fonts.
I meant to link the CVE sorry. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2011-3402