Typefaces

For as long as I can remeber `Fixed' has been my font of choice in just about all of the programs I use. Recently I've taken a stronger interest in typography with plans to even make my own typeface. Anyway I'm curious what you look for in a typeface, and any that you particularly like. Do you prefer the consistancy of using a monospace font everywhere like I have done, or do you prefer to use appropriate fonts for the application you're currently using?

>>16354 (you) I think for me personally I prefer crisp type, so I prefer fonts that are designed to work well without anti-aliasing like raster fonts, Georgia, Verdana, and Tahoma. I certainly prefer typefaces where it's easy to distinguish O from 0 and l from 1 and I. Other preferences seem to come and go with the application I'm using, I think I prefer proportional sans-serif websites, proportional serifed books and personal writing, and monospace sans-serif programming and shell fonts. I think my general aesthetic preference is for slightly heavier weight and more curved non-geometric typefaces because they feel a bit more humane I guess. I think it'd be really neat to have a font super family which I used for everything, that way you'd get a good compromise of consistency and adaptability.

>>16355 (you) I manually assessed Inter UI, Input, Iosevka, Fira Code, Source Code Pro, & PT Mono in addition all of the following based on the metrics listed in the last post: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/work/FontSurvey.aspx Of these Liberation Mono, PT Mono, Terminus, Inter UI, Input, & Proggy stand out as having no faults in their rasters and distinguishable forms. Andala Mono, Dina, and Serily Serif Mono were all quite close with only minor flaws. PT Mono, Liberation Mono, Inter UI, & Input are all vector fonts, meaning their clarity will scale regardless of your screen size. PT Mono & Liberation Mono support for all European alphabets which is preferable due to the amount of overlap between these alphabets making fall back fonts often look strange.

>>16356 (you) I'm unsure why this rendered so much differently on my machine than in the font survey, but Liberation Mono does not render well without anti-aliasing.

>>16356 Liberation fonts (and many other fonts today) render awfully without AA.

>>16375 >Liberation fonts (and many other fonts today) render awfully without AA. This is certainly the case, and honestly it's a great thing AA gives type designers so much more flexibly. I could certainly see others viewing my standards as foolish. I was just surprised because in the survey I posted it was rendered perfectly, I'm not really sure what the reason is. What do you look for in a typeface lain? Anyway PT Mono actually did render exceptionally other than the 'w's and 'm's touching one another when written next to one another at my font size, but this was frustrating enough for me to switch again. I'm currently using Terminus but it has its fair share of issues as well. 't', 'f', 'k', braces, brackets, and parenthesis are all poorly designed... I doubt Inter UI, or Input would be rendered any better so I suppose I'll take a gander at Proggy next, unlike the other typefaces I've tried so far it seems to lack international support which is a shame.

>>16386 >and honestly it's a great thing AA gives type designers so much more flexibly. There is a thing like full/partial/abscence of hinting and higher DPIs. They can design anything they want, I'd want to be have good looking pixel fonts.

>>16387 >There is a thing like full/partial/abscence of hinting and higher DPIs. They >can design anything they want, I'd want to be have good looking pixel fonts. That's interesting I wasn't aware that hinting was scalable, that would be very nice.

>>16354 (you) >with plans to even make my own typeface. This has been really awful work, it's really rough on you eyes, and your wrists, and exceedingly boring at this scale. I don't think I can encourage others to do this unless you feel you truly need to. I've made a small bitmap font covering the first ~500 glyphs of the 1,366 glyphs needed for full support of Latin scripts in unicode. I then have 300 code points for Greek, 400 for Cyrilic, and maybe 200 for various Math/Programming symbols I still need to do. I think I've done justice to every form but digraphs, and dual diacritic capital letters which I simply don't have enough space to do well. I also think I solved many of the issues I've been having with other type faces, achieving a fairly consistent color despite the limitations. I'll post it once it's sufficiently complete. Unfortunately it's only likely to work for others if you have a low DPI display like myself.

>>16452 (you) I thought I'd give a progress update. I've got implementations of the first 8 blocks, along with `General Punctuation', `Superscripts and Subscripts' `Currency Symbols' & `Number Forms' I was a bit disappointed when I first switched over my primary machine to use the typeface but after some tweaking I think I have at least ASCII where I want it. There are still many more glyphs to implement and refinement to do, but I'll hopefully have something I'd be willing to release here in a few weeks.

I'm willing to call this the first release of my type face. I believe it supports all european scripts as well as many other symbols of use. Mathematics symbols and box symbols are two things I'd still consider necessary for this to be a quality font, but I'm entirely out of time and energy to implement these. It's licensed under GPLv3 without the font exception, which means that the screen shot attached is also GPLv3. If you'd like to help out with the project criticism is highly valued, especially from individuals who use non-anglo and especially non-latin writing systems. Beyond this implementing mathematics or block symbols would also be exceptionally helpful but I doubt anyone would do this. Anyway hopefully one of you will find this project of use.

>>16835 Attached is a up to date view of what the font looks like. If you'd like to install it download and rename the previously attached text file to untitled.bdf and put it in a ~/.fonts next run the command: shell cd ~/.fonts mkfontdir && xset fp+ ~/.fonts && xest fp rehash