Space Mono | Hacker News Reader

Space Mono

fonts.google.com

88 pointsdavidbarker64 comments

For some reason this contains fi and fl ligatures, which look pretty odd on a monospaced font:

I'd not spotted that before reading your comment, and went looking expecting a double-width ligature, which would be quite cool. Squeezing the ligature into a single character width seems sub-optimal for a monospaced font.

I've done the same with my own programming font (mononoki http://madmalik.github.io/mononoki/ ) There is a difference between a ligature that a font may provide when you type in f and i and the unicode point 'LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FI', that is in there for historical reasons.

the first one would make sense as double width character, the second one should be single width to show, that the unicode point 'LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FI' is meant

That's an interesting point. But in this case, I had typed 'fl' and 'fi', so surely your first clause applies?

What does 'mono-space' even mean if they're going to do that!

I just created a variant that removes the ligatures, it's called "Space Mono NL":

http://tweetcompressor.com/temp/spacemono-nl.zip

Am I missing something here? Is this a new font or something? Is it a recommended mono used for coding? Do people like it?

I am pretty happy with Monaco

I've been using Monaco for years. Something about it is very pleasing to me. However, I'm sort of bored with it and haven't been able to find a suitable replacement.

Try (if you haven't) PT Mono, Fantasque Sans Mono, or Dejavu Sans Mono (which is not too different from Menlo).

I was in same same boat, but took a liking to Inconsolata-dz https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Inconsolata

I really like (and currently use) Input Mono.

http://input.fontbureau.com

Chiming in to agree. I like how you can customize certain characters (like `*' being at the top or in the middle of text, `g' being one or two stories, `0' having a slash or dot).

Try Fantastique Sans Mono:

https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans

At the very least, it will make you really appreciate Monaco.

I find "Roboto Mono Sans" very pleasing and easy to read on dark background. Looks great in Terminal also.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Mono?query=roboto+m... click on the paint button top right to switch to dark bg

FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/ ;) ... I actually like it.

No, it's not recommended for coding; it's a display font, to be used for headlines, titles, and the like, things where you want a little bit of stylistic flair. Here's the description from the link:

  About

  Space Mono is an original fixed-width type family designed by Colophon 
  Foundry for Google Design. It supports a Latin Extended glyph set, 
  enabling typesetting for English and other Western European languages.

  Developed for editorial use in headline and display typography, the 
  letterforms infuse a geometric foundation and grotesque details with 
  qualities often found in headline typefaces of the 1960s (See: 
  Microgramma[1], Eurostile[2]), many of which have since been co-opted by 
  science fiction films, television, and literature.

  Typographic features include old-style figures, superscript and subscript 
  numerals, fractions, center-height and cap-height currency symbols, 
  directional arrows, and multiple stylistic alternates.

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgramma_(typeface)
  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile

it's not recommended for coding

You're not kidding! Code displayed in this font looks downright bizarre[0]!

[0] https://i.imgur.com/6HHFhCw.png

I think that looks lovely...

Gotta say, wasn't that interested when I clicked the link thinking "yet another programming font". I must have 30 or so installed and yet still end up using Consolas (mostly because it's the default in my IDE and I've had to reinstall a few times this last year).

I will say, though, that I have always hated the traditional "a" used in fonts, preferring the more simplified one that's typically used in handwriting, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was one of the very few that use my preferred style. Yes, it can be ambiguous with the "o" character (though this has never been a problem in practice with the font configured even at the small sizes I use) but I find it more ascetically pleasing for whatever reason.

In most fonts the italic "a" is as you describe. (Like a truncated "d".)

I should have specified the fonts I was referring to were monospace fonts, specifically, which out of the 12 I've got installed on my machine I've got only one is the "truncated 'd'" style, unfortunately.

If you are aware of others, please post links, I'd love to have a few more.

That style is usually called “single story a”. Monaco is a common monospaced typeface that uses it. I suspect that style is less common because at small sizes it's easily confused with o.

Ah, I see. Yes that doesn't seem to be so common.

This "a" is the main reason I use "Clean" here (distributed in clR6x12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz by xorg)

Unfortunately, that's a bitmap font, so not always appropriate depending on your monitor.

I think you meant "aesthetically pleasing", but I'm looking forward now to using the phrase "ascetically pleasing" in earnest :)

You are correct ... I misspelled it, right-clicked it and let spell checker replace it without looking at the result. Oops!

If you are looking for the TTF download: https://github.com/googlefonts/spacemono/tree/master/fonts

I could really use a serif monospace font for coding and terminals. Haven't found a good one yet.

EDIT: Bitmap fonts preferred for crystal clear rendering and performance.

Operator[0]

[0]: http://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator

Which costs $199.

That's sans-serif.

There's a monospace font Operator Mono on the same page.

Thanks, but unfortunately that's not what I would call consistently serif, more like some letters looking hand-written.

For my terminals, I use MingLiU, on OS X. It's primarily an Asian scripts font, and the roman characters are monospaced.

There's little difference between O and 0 or l and 1, though, so I don't use it for coding, but it's good enough for my use of the terminal.

http://i.imgur.com/mAq8b5b.png

Luxi Mono isn't bad either, but the capital o and the zero are almost pixel for pixel identical, which is a deal breaker for me. https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Luxi-Mono

Have you tried Luxi Mono or Linux Libertine Mono?

Will try again, but it didn't look as clean and sharp as Terminus, Fixed or even DejaVu Sans Mono.

PT Mono?

I had the same issue as with any other TTF font that's not DejaVu, meaning foggy rendering.

Take a look at The Oldschool PC Font Resource

http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

There a some quite good monospace font with serifs. I use them a lot at my terminals, reminds me of the good old days ...

Thanks, IBM EGA9 and CompaqThin look nice.

>Bitmap fonts preferred for crystal clear rendering and performance.

Where by "crystal clear" you mean terrible jagged edges?

No, I mean zero smearing with/without anti-aliasing and pixel-perfect versions of the font that fit exactly into the raster. This is certainly a subjective matter, so it's moot to discuss why I fall into the crowd that finds pixel-perfect bitmap monospace fonts most pleasing. Thought it's telling if you see that even Mac users sometimes prefer misc-fixed: https://monkey.org/~marius/beautiful-fixed-width-fonts-for-o...

>No, I mean zero smearing with/without anti-aliasing and pixel-perfect versions of the font that fit exactly into the raster.

I feel like this is not an issue with hi-dpi displays anymore (plus sub-pixel antialiasing and other niceties).

I can't verify that, but it's kinda unfortunate that to have clear text rendering we have to process a much larger number of pixels, though it may be the logical solution. I hope you're right.

I think it's inevitable as per the laws of physics/optics/etc -- as long as fonts have curves, to have them render clear we need to process a much larger number of pixels.

I guess it's comes from information theory (Shannon/Nyquist etc).

I've been using Triplicate (http://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html) for a few years and it's still my favorite by far. Not free, but really reasonably priced. (Note there's a special variant suitable for coding, you can see examples in Racket in the PDF specimen.)

Have you tried Iosevka (the Slab variant is serif)?

Not a bitmap font, but pretty customisable. With hints of PragmataPro, it's my go-to font at the moment. Looks especially nice with OS X font hinting.

https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

My command-line for building is:

$ make STYLE_COMMON='v-tilde-low v-asterisk-low v-underscore-low'

This gives the vertically centered asterisk and tilde, and puts the underscore below the baseline.

W and g are really weird...

I've patched the font for powerline https://gist.github.com/andreicek/b369bff8807be005be7cd5ac4f...

This looks cool, I especially like the lower-case characters (with the possible exception of the descender on the g). Also, the idea of using a monospaced font as a display font rather than a font for restricted environments (terminals) is new to me.

This may be a tangent, but speaking of mono fonts sponsored by big SV firms: Am I the only one who would like to see Apple's San Francisco Mono (which they stealthily debuted at WWDC) released properly (i.e. as an independent font file)? It's currently in the Xcode preview, but you can't use it anywhere else.

Font's cool, but damn, gotta remark on Google's UI polish in (what I assume is) Material. It's so smooth and fluid -- I'd love to create something that coherent.

Not so fluid on my Chrome on Android. Bring up the search sidebar and try to scroll it.

and start scroll produces some jittering on my mac book 2015 osX with chrome.

the numbers look really ugly. I'd hate to see this in an IDE

After testing it my conclusion is that it is not as good as 'monofur' if you want a monospaced eurostile inspired font.

Being geometric is good, but why the /g is so strange?

I've added it to the programming font comparison: http://www.s9w.io/font_compare/

I'd fork it and add a sample of https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font (more like a terminal font than a programming one) if I had a Windows machine with Sublime Text on hand. Can you add it for me?

Sure, I'll add it later. A Github issue is the easiest next time so I don't miss things here in the comments

Yep, that's a font.

And here I expected a disease.

I had space mono once... not fun.

And the crowd goes mild.

(o^^)o Something went wrong. Please try again soon.

Thats what i got in iPhone.

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