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Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone ever made a monospace font with dynamic kerning? Which is a silly thing I never thought of until I read the above comment. This sounds nonsensical at first glance(and it may be) but hear me out.

We use monospace fonts for a reason, they stack in a grid nicely. But within the confines of that grid there is room to shift a character left or right a bit which may lead to a nicer to read monospace. (it is equally likely to lead to a hideous mess, every time a letter would shift left it would leave a larger space right)

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Monaspace has a feature called "texture healing" that does something similar: it allows bigger letters to "steal" space from adjascent smaller letters, to make it easier to read. The result is that the letters are still in a grid, while still allowing for bigger letters to "breathe".

https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/blob/main/docs/Textu...

It's the main reason I use monaspace as a font.

What a brilliant idea, neat. Thanks for the link.

I'm open to trying it, but my gosh, having one 'w' offset slightly by a few pixels from the one right above it feels like it would drive me bonkers eventually.

And: doesn't this result in text that "jumps around" as you type?

Only at most one letter jumps around, the previous letter you typed.

iA Writer has Mono, Duo and Quattro fonts, with the latter two being almost monospaced. They concede some size variations for specific characters (Duo has 150% width characters, Quattro also uses 50% and 75% for narrow characters).

It's a fun subtle adaptation to keep close to the typewriter-like experience of the app.

https://ia.net/topics/a-typographic-christmas

Duo is perfect middle ground between monospace and proportional sans, in my opinion at least. There's also Trispace[1].

https://etceteratype.co/pages/trispace

Shifting a letter left or right a bit can break the grid. What if the user writes the text that keeps triggering left shifts? A better solution is to use ligatures, so that specific character combinations look better while the ligature can maintain the overall width correctly.

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