Not trying to be negative, just confused: I don't really see how this font is "designed for symbol-heavy languages". The symbols look normal to me. Maybe the letters are a little more spaced? I'd love to be enlightened.
The GitHub page has a list with 5 items of what was the focus, this is the first (and I think the most easily noticeable) area
Because when you say "and $, @, % seem ever mismatched?", I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. I certainly am curious though, since you went to all the work of building a new typeface!
And when you talk about fixing alignment, like all of these seem correctly vertically aligned with each other here on HN at least in monospace mode:
<->=+-~
about the alignment, i think the README might give an impression that it's solely about vertical alignment, but it's more about uniform flow of characters along with some resemblance with an actual symbol (which we can not have in ASCII).
for example, take the `<-` combination. i think you're correctly pointing out that in most fonts they are indeed vertical-aligned properly. but there are other details (horizontal alignment, angle between strokes, weights, etc) which i found missing. in most monospace fonts, these less-than and more-than signs are not designed with the view that their most common usage is indeed not checking for inequality but for bitwise operators and struct pointer dereferencing (C), function declaration and monadic/applicative/functorial programming (Haskell), shell redirection (bash), function composition (OCaml, Elixir), tags (HTML), and countless others. if you think about it that way, it makes sense to not make the angle between strokes too small. many monospace fonts do it because they respect classical typographic conventions regarding space and design. the same goes for the designs for backquote, tilde, comma, colon. in most monospace fonts, backquote is so small it's barely visible and tilde looks too much like the hyphen, etc.
Myna is my attempt to break some of these conventions to make things look a little bit even for programmers.
I'd be very, very surprised if inequalities was used less often.
Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the work you put into the font and it looks very nice but that part of your post struck me
the inequalities would probably be more common than bitwise/pointer usage in C, most because of for loops, i guess.
but if you consider all the other languages i listed, it is obviously not the case, especially in Haskell and even HTML.
A search on Google Fonts shows most monospaced fonts keep them vertically aligned, but there definitely are exceptions:
https://fonts.google.com/?preview.text=%3C-%3E%3D%2B-~&categ...
languages which insist on using full Unicode like APL and Agda have bigger problems (availability of uniform glyphs and inconsistency with monospace design) on their plates. which imo is one reason why full Unicode editing hasn't really caught up.
Myna doesn't use any ligatures though. it would run on almost all terminals and editors.
The big problem that I am having with this font is that its narrowness makes it difficult to find a fallback font for APL/BQN that plays well.
Not everyone likes it, but I do.
i've not been faithful to the original design of Source Code Pro or even Fira Mono or Ubuntu Mono (from which i also derived a lot) but do try to stick to a simple geometrical ideal with only a few exceptions.