Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface

Don't get me wrong, it beautiful, easy to read and the price is right (in my opinion), but when you see the Python, even at 17pt, it seems squished. The characters just blurs together. This font either requires insane amounts of whitespace around it, or a high font size, I'm guessing no less than 20pt. Maybe it's just the line height that makes it weird, the characters seems like they need to be wider to avoid losing details.

The owner of this website (neil.computer) does not allow hotlinking to that resource (/content/images/2022/02/Artboard-5.png).

Based on this screenshot, the readability suffers because the typographic color (edit for non-type-nerds… basically the density of ink in any block of text if printed in black)* is too dark. Single lines aren’t bad even if words could stand to be tracked out a touch, but the density makes entire blocks pretty tough to parse quickly, which is a showstopper for scanning logs. Outside of a terminal, you could mitigate it with leading and tracking to some extent. Even then, the combination of slightly heavy stroke weight, tall x-height, and comparatively tight packing make it feel pretty cramped.

Formally, the glyphs generally sit nicely as well-balanced individual artifacts, but the relationships don’t materialize to form visually fluid words. For example, if you look at “BERKELEY” in your title SVG, the slope on top of the B and R either needs to start later or needs to be more severe. With the strong horizontal created by the cap line in all the other letters, the very slight curve starting that early makes it seem uneven rather than softened. There isn’t enough horizontal momentum or obvious departure from it to look deliberate, and everything else is too uniform for that subtlety to look appropriate. Menlo, as probably the closest mono analog, resolves that tension by starting the curve later and making giving it a more deliberate attack.

I don’t think this has too far to go before being adapted, but those types of issues are what I’d expect to see in an open source type family rather than a $75 bundle. Having a flat price and throwing in a bunch of extra seats compared to the big foundries doesn’t really make sense. To business customers, $75 once vs some user based licensing billed out periodically doesn’t make much of a difference. Individual folks hesitate to pay $39 for Matthew Carter’s gorgeous Big Caslon because they don’t want to pay $39, not because they don’t get enough seats.

I think you need to go over the license copy with an attorney or native English speaker, since I am still left confused by your comments.

Bell Labs did a tremendous amount of basic research, materials science, and things with no direct commercial application.

UNIX was created with no purpose in mind other than to get some MULTICS-like functionality out of an old machine and not worry about design-by-committee.

The first real use for it was document processing and it took off from there. Never was a telecom system ever at AT&T AFAIK and didn’t do networking until much later.

There were no “teams” there, just someone would see what someone else was working on and dive in to help. Stick a bunch of smart people in a building and see what comes out.

R&D at Bell Labs was to play with ideas first and then find an application. That’s how we got the transistor and UNIX, and waaaay more things that never saw the light of day.

That mode of R&D is dead now. It was dying even as UNIX was being developed, and they got management cover. The use for speeding up technical documentation really was the first business value justification. That was also how they managed to get the PDP-11 and how C got created for the port.

I can't find an article for it, but I remember reading somewhere that AT&T's extravagant research budget and forays outside of telecommunications were partially a defensive maneuver: AT&T was aware that the US government could dismantle its monopoly at any moment, and invested heavily in R&D as a token of good faith.

The commercial license for this is also a steal.

Seems like on here, free typefaces are desired but a lot of these free typefaces are released by multi-million dollar corporations...they have someone on payroll to work on them.

I welcome indie typographers.

Then... don't buy it? I mean, it's not like there aren't hundreds of other fonts to choose from, many of which are free.