Show HN: Iosevka Open Source Programming Typeface | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Iosevka Open Source Programming Typeface

be5invis.github.io

67 pointsbe5invis27 comments

I will confess to not being a fan. Characters seem too keen to fill their boxes; i had to bump up the line spacing in my IDE before code was at all legible, and even then the letters seem elongated and spidery, and despite being taller than in the default font (Menlo, as this is IntelliJ), are harder to make out in their details - for example, the strokes of the 'w' are barely visible.

Reminds me a bit of mode 0 on the BBC Micro:

http://beebwiki.mdfs.net/MODE_0

This looks interesting. What are those .patel files? [1]

[1]: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/tree/master/glyphs

I don't know, but at a guess, it's a language which compiles down to PostScript. curveTo and lineTo are PostScript functions, and there is a concept of a current transform.

Nope, it compiles to JavaScript. The compiler is in http://github.com/be5invis/PatEL and it uses Patrisika (http://github.com/be5invis/patrisika) as its backend (which converts S-expression-ish AST into Mozilla AST, and generates JavaScript using Escodegen).

I really like it, but I wish type designers gave more love to the italics variations, they almost always come out as obliqué or slanted instead of a true italics.

In my opinion, this typeface could use a bit of inspiration from the elegance of Consolas (http://www.lucasfonts.com/case-studies/calibri-consolas/)

Something about the stroke width and shape remind me of the Acorn typeface. Although it's only a passing similarity, somehow it makes me feel nostalgic. http://www.houseofmabel.com/puters/RISCOS3/plain.gif

I especially appreciate that it renders very cleanly at all point sizes in Windows Cleartype. A lot of fonts look fine at 12pt but then have odd jagged pixels at other sizes. Two cents: the double quote is a little anemic compared to the other (nicely sized) punctuation.

Thanks for your suggestion. I will fix it in v0.0.5

Just threw v0.0.4 into gedit for a trial run. I like it a lot, very readable. I will echo JohnDeHope's comment that the double quote seems a little too light to match well with the other characters. I'm eager to see where this goes!

Wow, very reminiscent of the Orator type ball on the IBM Selectric.

> compatible to CJK characters

Could someone explain what does this mean?

This means that the latin character width is roughly half of character height, so "full-width" square CJK ideographs fits exactly as the width of two "half-width" latin characters.

(Wider monospace fonts would typically require extra character spacing between CJK ideographs.)

Ref: http://www.w3.org/TR/clreq/#basic_features_of_chinese_script ("squares with the ratio of 1:1, and are seamlessly arranged with one another.")

Oddly, the sample isn't visible, even with JavaScript turned on.

This is in Firefox on Linux.

I switched zepto.js to local directory and replaced $.getJSON with $.get (since .charmap may be sent as application/octet-stream). Is it fixed?

It does work now, thanks.

But it's very slow to respond to clicks. Please consider just putting in some img tags and linking in images…

Love it! Any chances to see powerline specific characters added to this font?

My current goal is to make it WGL4 compatible. Powerline glyphs will be included later, though I can not test them since I am using VSCode.

You can just try to open some shell theme with those glyphs to test them. I can also provide you just some code file with them in if you want.

really fine work. just installed it and viewing some of my code (scala in emacs w/ a light theme) i swapped source code pro for this font

Question, how is it generated by code?

The outlines of every character are calculated by source code (the .patel files, compiles to JavaScript).

This is so Pragmata Pro. :)

Love the ks especially.

Well done, thank you for this!

Sometimes all it takes it a new font to jog your creativity a bit.

What was your inspiration for this ?

Mainly Pragmata Pro, and I brought some ideas form DIN and M+ 1m series. All glyphs are exactly 0.5em wide so they can be compatible with 中日韩文字 (CJK characters, where every character are excatly 1em wide).

Please excuse my ignorance, and please correct me so I may learn, as I have no idea about fonts except that I simply them in my editors :)

The inspiration of M+ 1m + Pragmata Pro is very interesting and make for a powerful font.

Do you anticipate further font development, driven by the same code-generated workflow, attempting to tackle modernization of something like the venerable Misc Fixed 13pt, which needs an update for modern screens and/or resolutions?

Then, there's the Apple Menlo/Monaco, Ubuntu Mono and derivatives, as well as Consolas and its derivatives which tend to focus on wider glyphs , as opposed to the narrowness and (longer?) line-heights of similar fonts to M+ 1m / Pragmata Pro? It would be interesting to see if newer fonts can evolve from this approach.

Thanks for a great project!

My future work will be focused on spatial balance and glyph coverage. (I'd want to coverage ALL UNICODE POINTS of Latin/Greek/Cyrillic/IPA, thanks to the building script generating them will be much easier than using a conventional font editor: Just add a mark glyph and all combining glyphs using it will be automatically generated.)

Maybe I can make a library or toolchain after this font is almost completed, as a modernized METAFONT, which produces Opentype directly from your generation source code. And well, in that toolchain, i will not use PatEL since this language has not been documented yet.

That sounds like it would be a grand idea! Will be watching closely to see how it evolves. Thanks again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com