That texture healing looks super nice. Is that something fonts can just do or does it require special editor support?
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 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:
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.
The fonts are nice but I absolutely hate the “copilot voice” text moving around idea, it’s absolutely terrible to read.
I don’t think the intention is that Copilot voice would be animated, I think they just had a dumb idea to highlight it that way in the demo. Look closely, and you’ll see the Copilot voice is the only text there written in the “Krypton” font. The animation indeed looks godawful.
Hmm nothing really jumped out at me at first glance, I don’t mind the ligature stuff, but also love monospace for the aesthetic.
But I am glad they’re experimenting with this stuff. Ive always wanted a sarcastica font, we’re almost there with sArCAsm. But it’s a pain to write :)
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 🤢
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?
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.
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.
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.
they look nice, I especially like Krypton, but to be honest cascadia code was already great. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
