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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> The solution to this problem: “uniwidth” typefaces, sometimes also called “equal-width”, “duplexed” or “multiplexed” typefaces. And no, I am not talking about monospaced fonts here.

I'm not into web design but I think the core problem here is lack of accepted terminology and even awareness that this type of font is a thing.

The article certainly brings awareness to something I didn't know is a thing but seems very useful.

My mind wants to say "weight invariant" or "style invariant" but those suggest the thing doesnt look any different rather than just the size not changing with other characteristics.

It's probably obvious that I don't like "uniwidth", but at the moment I can't think of anything better that isn't super wordy, like "font with style invariant width".

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> I'm not into web design but I think the core problem here is lack of accepted terminology and even awareness that this type of font is a thing.

It seems useful to name the property where character widths are consistent along their weight axis, but another case in point to support the sibling comment: I see only one other significant use of "uniwidth"[1], from 2015.

I also find "uniwidth" a poor and confusing name for this property, and "duplexed" and "multiplexed" even worse.

If I had to suggest a better alternative, I think something like "width-invariant" or "width-invariant proportional" would be clearer.

[1] https://www.fontshop.com/people/david-sudweeks/fontlists/uni...

As someone who does type design, "duplexed" is the term I've seen used most often. It is usually used when talking about tabular numerals, which are monospaced and duplexed (sharing the same advance width for glyphs across all weights).

Edit: Like most font terminology, I think it has historical roots predating digital type, and refers to the way styles or weights might sit above one another on the matrices.

‘Duplexed’ comes from Linotype machines that used a pair of fonts, normally roman and italic, on a set of matrices. For mechanical reasons the two versions of each character had to be the same width.

I just wrote a Wikipedia page for uniwidth typeface. Thanks for mentioning this origin!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniwidth_typeface

If you're going to use the term 'invariant' then 'width-invariant' is a bit unfortunate as that seems to imply it is invariant w.r.t. width, rather than that the width itself is invariant w.r.t. something else.

The most 'correct' version would be 'font with weight-invariant width', but that's a bit long.

Case in point: one of the fonts mentioned, recursive, has been on HN before (with 108 comments), but I only found one comment that explicitly talks about this property, and it doesn't do so by name. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23934409

Yep I initially thought "uniwidth" is synonymous with "monospaced" fonts.

But these uniwidth fonts can have Sans and Mono variants like Recursive[0], so methinks these could've been just called what they are: "no-reflow" fonts? lol

[0] https://www.recursive.design/

Somewhat interestingly, there is a great deal of inconsistency in naming in the type design world — both in marketing features like this, but also down to terminology for specific parts of letters. I agree that it would be very useful, but for whatever reason it never seems forthcoming. My assumption has always been that type design is a fairly distributed discipline (at least amongst latin-alphabet-using countries), but remains niche, so there’s more or less only regional terminology without much consistency. (This is purely observational, so take from this what you will)

I kinda want to call them "weight agnostic", but that might be even more confusing

Yea i might start start being self concious about my obesity and beliefs, haha

Fonts designed in this manner have been around for awhile, so it’s not really a new concept, except in its application to every glyph in a type family. The term I’ve used with type and other designers is actually “tabular,” which contrasts with “proportional.” Look up tabular vs proportional numerals for a topic that’s been around since printing presses ruled publishing.

Tabular numerals are actually more like monospace than uniwidth[-as-defined-here]; it's a font where all characters have the same width... as long as those characters are numerals. Variations like "weight-tabular" or "numerically-tabular" might work, although it's less obvious which properties "tabular" is holding constant (namely width; technically also height but noone varies that anyway).

Tabular numerals, when done correctly, are both monospaced and duplexed (sharing the same advance width) across weights.

Agreed, though I maintain that it's in general unclear exactly which properties the advance width is constant with respect to. (For tabular numerals, is-digit-zero-versus-one clearly is, but what about digit-versus-question-mark when writing "27'3?? items" to indicate three significant figures? What about "+" and "-", which should have the same width as each other, despite not being numerals at all? Full monospacing solves this, but that's often a stronger constraint that you actually need.)

Also, nominally monospace fonts often end up having character-dependant width anyway (ranging from blatant bugs like substiting fallback characters without forcing them to the correct size, to completely legitimate-ish variations like CJK ideographs with integer multiples of the normal character width). So, I'd still say tabular numerals are more like a weaker form of monospace than a stronger form of uniwidth - constant width across styles may or may not be relevant, but if it is, it's table stakes (no pun intended).

Yep it's totally up to the type designer which extra glyphs are supported alongside tabular numerals. Usually period, comma, plus, minus, equals, dollar (and other currencies), space, but I've never thought to include a question mark in the set.

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