Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

With a few tweaks (monospaced variant), it could make a great coding font.

Coding fonts have essentially the same goal: make similar looking characters different: 1liI|, 0O, etc... Code naturally strains our visual acuity: we want to see as much as possible, it means that we may use a smaller font size than we would find comfortable reading text with. Single letter, punctuation, etc... can be really important, in regular text, you can understand even if you can't read all the characters. So a hyperlegible font can help coders, even those with good vision, and many coding fonts already have "hyperlegible" features.

View on HN

I made my best attempt at this. I made custom Iosevka[1] builds that use the letter shapes from this font. I call it Hypersevka, and the build plans are available at [2].

[1] https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ [2] https://github.com/jdknezek/Iosevka/blob/jdk/private-build-p...

Nice. Any chance you can post a screenshot?

Sure! Here are some screenshots (Iosevka customizer then VS Code):

https://imgur.com/a/iLejIfc

Any chance you'd make a derivative font - monospaced or not - that uses different letter heights (i forget the technical term) for dyslexic users?

What are the PTL files in the repository? GitHub doesn't identify the language, and I don't recognize it, either.

That’s the "Patel" programming language used to define Iosevka. See https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL.

Check out DejaVu Sans Mono[1], if you haven't already. That's what I use for programming. Has good versions of 1LiI0O (etc).

[1] https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/

(examples in PDF: http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/samples/DejaVuSansMono.pdf)

Unless you're on a Mac, in which case just use Menlo, which is already installed. Menlo and DejaVu Sans Mono are both descendants of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, and are nearly identical. (And where they differ, Menlo is superior IMHO.)

Indeed, that's what I thought too when I read about the letter distinction. The reverse slash on the 0 seems a little odd, but otherwise this looks like a proportional version of Consolas.

No font should lack crossbars on the capital "i." That's just straight-up dumb. Nice to see that the font in question doesn't suffer from that mistake.

Failure to distinguish O from 0 ranks pretty high on the "don't" list as well.

Pardon me, where do I find the monospace variant?

What OP was saying was a few tweaks could make a monospace variant, which would be a nice programming font. I don't think a monospace variant is available right now.

Ah yes, sorry. I think MonaLisa actually fits the bill: https://www.monolisa.dev/

For the life of me I just can't get over how different the g is from the rest of the letters. I find it incredibly distracting, so I can't use this font.

Increasing differentiability (within reason and identifiability) is the point of fonts that are trying to increase legibility. g has the potential of being confused with 9, y, 0, etc. for folks with non-optimal sight.

Their paid (120 USD) Monolisa Plus variant does have the regular g, though.

For some reason I can't stop giggling at this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com