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Comment by neilpanchal | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on a new typeface[1][2] for code - Berkeley Mono. I've taken some inspiration from Jet Brains Mono, SF Mono, Bit Stream Vera, Andale Mono, OCR-B, Univers, Eurostile and Monogramma from the 50's, and weird things like the German License Plate slashed 0. Anyone interested in beta testing? neil@berkeleygraphics.com.

[1] https://neil.computer/notes/introducing-berkeley-mono/

[2] https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-december-update/

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Matter of taste, but I like and recommend single-storey a in the regular not just the italic type face as variant. Or preferably even as default/only variant as I don't find switching double-storey to single-storey, or other drastical change of basic shapes for that matter convincing for a coding font.

Thanks for the feedback. Double-storey ‘a’ does make things busy. I’ll see what I can do with optional single storey ‘a’ as a stylistic set. The problem with stylistic sets is no one uses them and they’re not well supported in programming tools. I’ve got automated font file generation script in Glyphs app that generates all variants as separate fonts, so users can download whatever they want. I’ll try to create a single storey ‘a’ as an option, definitely for italics which are still under development.

Personally I love it and your aesthetics, kudos. Is it going to be for sale or openly licensed?

I am thinking for sale, after one year make it open source? Another option is to make it free for personal use, and paid for commercial use. Font licensing is too complicated and I want to simplify it just as if I were to purchase the font for myself - unlimited use for anything and everything. No one should have to worry about using fonts for obvious use cases such as embedding in avionics, etching on nuclear power plant control panels and designing submarine bailout signs.

Looks neat so far! Do you plan on supporting ligatures?

Unlikely. Explicitness and the binding between the code you see with the eyes and the keys on the keyboard shouldn’t be violated IMHO. Ligatures add ambiguity (“what’s this symbol? Which keys were pressed to create it?”), great for manuscripts and literature but not so great for code I personally think.

Neil, congrats your site! It looks great, very cool design and content. The Berkeley font also looks very nice. I'll beta test.

Great work, looking forward to trying it out when it's ready

Very cool! I want to try this with cool-retro-term and vim. :)

looks great

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