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Comment by reassembled | Hacker News Reader

IBM released a typeface a couple of years ago with much marketing fan fare:

https://www.ibm.com/plex/ https://github.com/IBM/plex

On another note, are there any notable examples of AI-generated mono-spaced programmer fonts?

That IBM website promoting it is the most ridiculously overengineered yet totally unusable website I've used in quite some time on desktop. It's really quite something. Also disappointing that the Github README doesn't include alphanumeric sample text.

Eventually I just gave up and found a usable website to actually view and sample the font: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Mono

Luckily, the font is much better than the website!

If you go to https://www.ibm.com/plex/gallery/ and scroll down to "Plex will be mega-international.", you can replace that text with your own, for testing. But I agree that it's ridiculously overengineered and it took way too much time to find this.

For me it's the doublethink trade-show signage.

I like the font, though, not as much as Source Code Pro Nerd ExtraLight.

I think I just found my new favorite font. I'm absolutely addicted to grotesque sans-serif, I used to use Roboto everywhere, but now I'm currently using Cantarell (GNOME's default font, a humanist typeface) as my desktop font and as an overwrite font for every single website I open, but I might just start using Plex Sans and Plex Mono now. Thank god it's OFL.

I still find it fascinating that there are so many different typefaces with such subtle differences in them, but since I'm looking at characters in the screen the entire day, these characters better be beautiful and pleasing.

I'm not gonna lie, every time I swap fonts on my desktop I keep remembering that one scene from American Psycho [0]. Maybe I should touch some grass.

[0]: https://youtu.be/cISYzA36-ZY

brb setting my editor font to "Silian Rail"

Impressive. Very nice.

Let's see Paul Allen's font.

You'll love Linus Boman's take on it then [1]

If you love neo-grotesques, you can't do much better than Neue Haas Grotesk or Atlas Grotesk [2]. Both are by CommercialType, both cost a pretty penny, but both are absolutely amazing.

I fully agree with you about wanting beautiful and pleasing characters though. It's my gift to myself for being paperfree. If I'm going to read on screen instead of printed, I want the best possible experience. 32" 4K display, professional fonts, nice software for writing in etc.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKc54z5SsEs

[2]: https://commercialtype.com/catalog/atlas/atlas_grotesk

The best possible experience is 6-8k at 32", low DPI can go burn in hell.

Amen. It's a shame dell released that one 8K monitor and peaced out. It's still available but it's expensive as hell, and I could not for the life of me justify needing dual DP cables. But I'm constantly tempted...

Each time they release something like this it's got to require two inputs, is clunky, may have tearing problems under some platforms, and is discontinued not very long after due to lackluster sales. Remember they had a 5K monitor plagued with the same kind of trouble?

Given that most of the gear in the business world is laptop-shaped, requiring two DisplayPort cables is just not going to fly. What do you mean, "get that expensive USB-C to dual DisplayPort dongle from Sonnet"? I thought DP1.4 was perfectly capable of driving an 8K monitor over a single cable, heck, that's what my old Dell Precision 7520 laptop is supposed to be able to do.

"Atlas Typewriter, a companion monospaced family also in six weights" [1]

[1] https://commercialtype.com/news/atlas_grotesk_typewriter

Yep. Best of all, you can download trial versions of all of these to try them out.

I like Plex, but for some reason dislike fonts that put a dot in the middle of the zero.

If the O and the 0 are so similar that you need a decoration, then it's wrong.

If a decoration is absolutely necessary, then I prefer a slash. A big, meaty slash. Not one that is confined inside the zero.

FWIW, all IBM Plex fonts offer plain, dotted, and slashed zeroes via OpenType stylistic alternatives (dotted is default for Mono, plain for others).

On a (narrow) monotype font, it's pretty hard to make the capital 'O' wide/round enough, isn't it?

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