The way they talk about it makes it sound like they invented the written word, but that notwithstanding the fonts actually look really nice in my opinion.
Turns out I viscerally despise “handwriting” fonts. They’re harder to read. It just makes me recoil.
I also intensely dislike "ligatures " that turn like == into a separate glyph. Or the one that turns >= into the > with the line under it. No. Stop. That’s not what I typed. That’s not what I’m looking for when I scan the text.
Side note: I assume someone is feeling clever and is thinking of replying with a handwriting font message with ligatures. You don’t have to. I already imagined it.
The texture healing seems cool though, but I didn’t immediately notice or understand until I read through the detailed section on it.
I personally like ligatures when I’m programming. It took me some getting used to, but now I can’t live without them due to how distinct it makes the code segments. I fully understand disliking them though. Thankfully fonts like source code pro allow disabling features like ligatures and their godawful handwriting styled italics, so you’re able to use just the parts you like.
So I agree with OP on the style of the press release being infuriating.
It seems like a lot of tech releases these days are written for non technical journalists (ie The Verge), “tech influencers”, and cargo cultists. They always read in a way that’s super overhyped to the point where you almost want to be dismissive of the end product as a form of protests.
However the tech seems cool. Between VSCode and GitHub we’ll be seeing a lot of feedback sooner or later.
Will they replace Consolas in Windows with this one or is it a GitHub-only-thing? In Consolas the characters 1 and l look very similar, making the font unsuitable for coding and terminal use, so it would be good if they replaced it with something else.
Unfortunately this new font family still struggles with the l1 issue,in all but the last two typefaces. There’s a lot of good ideas here, and the Krypton version isn’t too bad, but I still struggle to see why they haven’t figured out that gaping issue on most of the styles here.
Very interesting technique to get the widths of the glyphs uniform without them looking ugly in most cases. OK, one can make it look bad if you know the “pain points” of the system, but in normal flowing texts, the fonts do look good.
This “texture healing” seems to be based on commit mono’s smart kerning commitmono.com although it only shifts letters around, it doesn’t change the characters.
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