Why the fuck is a page about fonts using 50% CPU?! Is it mining crypto or something?
I really hope Chrome gets its shit together and stabilizes the chrome.processes API during my lifetime so I or someone can make an extension that autokills or at least warns you about these shitty pages.
They’re pretty fonts and they’re released under SIL Open Font License 1.1. I dig it.
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 🤢
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
That texture healing looks super nice. Is that something fonts can just do or does it require special editor support?
It’s basically a different type of ligature - it is standard to OTF fonts, but requires ligature support in your editor/terminal. Just need to enable ligatures and/or enable specific ligature sets. See https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace#editors or maybe https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/font-shaping.html for the general procedure in a supporting terminal.
From https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace#editors :
If you want coding ligatures but do not want texture healing, you can omit the
caltsetting:
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
It’s an OpenType standard feature but the font rendering system has to support it and the app has to enable it. The page has a link to instructions for enabling it in VS Code but I have no idea about support status on different OS and desktop environments. I could see it working on webview on Android fwiw, I’m guessing it’s either well supported in general or at least by browsers.
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.
You’d think after that page of “texture healing”, alignment, etc. etc., Microsoft would actually make a fully, complete font first and foremost…
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…
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.
