Comment by killerdhmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by killerdhmo | Hacker News Reader

Repost from a year ago, link to existing discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354396

Including the comment I was about to type before I realized it had already been written:

"I hate to say this, but a font by a programmer makes as much sense as a database library by a font designer. Good font design is not about calculations or following principled rules; it's about what looks good to the eye, and it takes a tremendous amount of skill and experience. And to my eye, at least, the font is incredibly difficult to read. It literally looks like a font designed by an engineer for a plotter, not something designed for the human eye or legibility. Good fonts follow intuitive rhythms, they focus on word shapes (not just letter shapes), natural curves, there's a tremendous amount of subtlety that goes into achieving a proper sense of balance between letterforms, and a lot of things are actually different between letters/curves/etc. so that they look the same to the eye in the end. Even with "utilitarian" fonts like monospace ones. "Carefully planned and calculated" is a great recipe for building a bridge, but not for building a font, unfortunately."

I was just thinking the same stuff: "heart surgery for developers, by developers".

"Wow, that's a boring attitude."

My response to your quote had also already been written, isn't this a convenient day?

"Sorry if I come across as too negative -- I definitely 100% support people trying out new things." I just don't think that the byline "for programmers by programmers" is a good one. It was not meant to be an evaluation of the typeface itself.

Just curious, what would you say about this font sample: http://i.imgur.com/DSXqMCZ.png ? (It's a modification of Terminus, with smaller letter height to have a bit more whitespace between the lines)

I'm not the person you're replying to, but my answer: dizzying and illegible.

Individual characters can be made out, but words are hard to read. Not enough separation between letters and symbols, so constructs like "(pred=%i)\t" are harder to visually parse. I'm also not a fan of aliased pixel fonts -- it really exacerbates the picket-fence effect while reading.

Here's what your code sample looks like in Source Code Pro:

http://i.imgur.com/uAknyGB.png

Smaller font:

http://i.imgur.com/m0p17tm.png

Notice how all letters take up the full horizontal width so words clump together. It's easy to see that a space is a space, and not just an "i" next to an "l"

It's also worth noting that I had to try 3 separate OCR processors with your sample before I got one that didn't output complete garbage.

Thanks for such a great analysis! You pointed out some things I did not really think about. Especially the way Source Code Pro handles "i"s and "l"s.

I will try to add 1px of horizontal space between letters. The goal was to make the font vertically compact, but still legible. The size is small and it feels quite clumped though.

> the font is incredibly difficult to read.

"Fonts" are computer code. Typefaces are what you see, unless you're editing the font that will set the type on your screen.

From the wiki on Font:

In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, "font" is frequently synonymous with "typeface". In particular, the use of "vector" or "outline" fonts means that different sizes of a typeface can be dynamically generated from one design. Each style may still be in a separate "font file"—for instance, the typeface "Bulmer" may include the fonts "Bulmer roman", "Bulmer italic", "Bulmer bold" and "Bulmer extended"—but the term "font" might be applied either to one of these alone or to the whole typeface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font

While I appreciate your semantic formalism, considering that my fonts are collected and managed in my Font Book rather than my Typeface book, I think you've lost that battle, for now.

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