> Are you frustrated that -> looks nothing like an arrow
The proper solution is, of course, to allow ←arrows→ (and, naturally, not trying to fit a variable peg into a monowidth whole)... maybe in the next generation of languages when the bottom level of typesetting quality is raised a bit
i have addressed this in one of the other comments. it is impossible to achieve both elegance (good look) and consistency (monospace width) in these cases. many folks, like yourself, are pioneering full Unicode editing. we, on the other end, are just trying to make editing without ligatures elegant because ASCII, i believe, would remain predominant for a long time to come.
well, my "pioneering efforts" :) are killed by language designers, as you note "it is impossible", so we can only waste time looking for various workarounds like using fonts designed around those limits...
Is it really impossible? I'm not disputing you, but for my own learning. Is there somewhere I could read about impossibility of ligatures and monospace?
It's just a fundamental limitation of being boxed, nothing deeper than that: that means you can't fully control spacing, which is crucial in any design. For a simplified example, you can't have a long arrow that is as wide as 2.5 boxes, but instead of 0.5 boxes for spacing only have 0.1 (so a total of 2.6 boxes)
i think that you also maintained that it is impossible to reconcile monospace with Unicode.
what would be ideal is a variable-width font which covers most Unicode characters consistently. some Unicode characters (eg, arrow) would need space of 2 characters and so on. making it elegant would require quite a lot of work to ensure Unicode does't look out of place (eg, arrow in your comment).
these are the problems which make me feel full Unicode editing is difficult to achieve in the short run. not to mention the obvious issue of typing Unicode characters from the ASCII keyboard.
i've included a reasonable subset of Unicode in Myna but it may not look very good. don't get me wrong, i appreciate the Unicode advocacy. but until we've something good-looking and well-behaving tooling on that side, using it would be quite frustrating.
and don't solve the spacing issue, also: I see an →, so I type one in my search box, but can't find anything since it's not an arrow, but a fake replacement of ->
Or I press Shift+Right to select it, but can't, need to repeat it 3 times because again, it was a long arrow, not a single symbol. Then, of course, they could do a replacement in y our comments where you meant literal symbols, not an arrow...
This, like many fonts, fails to handle vertical arrows:
| ^
v |
Note that the raised appearance of `^` exists for compatibility with typewriters that use the backspace key to use it as a circumflex accent over lowercase letters. This is doubly obsolete today (we have real combined characters and can use them on uppercase). This is one of those cases where the name originally used for the character in various standards is in conflict with the way people actually have come to use it.
The bottom of the independent caret should be lower, roughly symmetrical to the letter `v` (this is not traditionally a goal). The top should still reach the height of a capital letter, but the bottom should descend into the lowercase letter area - for many fonts, perhaps to the level of the horizontal part of a lowercase `e` (is there a typographical term for this?)? For fonts where the x-height is half of the cap-height, there might be no overlap with the lowercase letter, though it still doesn't need to worry about leaving space.
The bottom of the caret is, however, higher than the mathematical "and" sign ∧, which rests on the baseline (and usually does not reach full height) or the Greek capital lambda `Λ` which is full height.
I have never seen anyone use it as part of an up arrow spread across two lines in the way that you’re suggesting. So I don’t really understand your point.
Ok it’s not symmetrical, but I don’t buy your argument that it _should_ be (or that it’s a reasonable complaint to make about a font).
Your point about the caret is interesting, but I'm a bit dubious about using them for vertical arrows. I don't think it would be practical to type this combination in one go, since the two symbols would be on two separate lines. For the upward arrow, are you suggesting caret-return-space-space-space-...-vertical bar?
Are there any programming languages that use vertical arrows? Do they appear on one line or two?
i don't think that qualifies. because the alignment issue is about multi-line alignment of upward arrows. APL usage is clearly meant to be covered by some single Unicode glyph.
thanks for pointing it out. as i mention below in a comment, there are bound to be many combinations which don't align (especially vertical ones). i would ideally tell you to invoke a feature request but i am not sure this esoteric combination could even be detected in a contextual alternate rule (which Myna doesn't support anyways for now).
beside if i may say so in my defense, the comparison is a bit unfair as a V (a full letter) is being compared to a caret (almost a superscript symbol). i have broken many typographical conventions but it won't make sense to break programmatic convention of the caret operator just for the alignment of the vertical arrows.
> Note that the raised appearance of `^` exists for compatibility with typewriters that use the backspace key to use it as a circumflex accent over lowercase letters. This is doubly obsolete today
The origins don’t really matter at this point. That’s what the character looks like and it’s what everyone expects.
Your use case is extremely niche. Making a font choice for that specific double-line situation would alienate everyone else who just wants the ^ to look like a ^.
Like others suggested, just use the Unicode arrows if you want arrows. Let the ^ be a classic ^.
It’s really disappointing when I find a new font that seems interesting until I encounter one weird design choice that makes it surprising to read. Fonts should be boring, typical, and follow what your brain expects to see, not trying to erase decades of typography norms and start something new for one common character.
> Fonts should be boring, typical, and follow what your brain expects to see
So you're ok with permanent confusion of 0 vs O because "boring/expected" doesn't add a dot for zero?
> erase decades of typography norms and
This is not (such) a (n absolute) thing, there are different contradictory norms that persist for decades, just like in and artistic (though not only) field, so at a practical level this offers no guidance for any specific decision, you'd have to actually consider it in that specific case to see whether it makes sense
I don't see such a niche use case as a design failure.
By your logic, the lowercase "v" should extend even higher to meet the pipe. The caret has conventionally been higher for a long time, and IMO would look out of place making it the inverse "v".
Iosevka is a beautiful font indeed. the condensed look of Myna was inspired by Iosevka. i saw it once in a coding demo and decided to make it condensed. the predecessor of Myna (called Hera, available on my profile) was just a customised version of Source Code Pro (and is non-condensed, just like Source Code Pro).
Beside being a neat font in its own right, Iosevka allows for custom builds with different settings, selection from a bunch glyph variants, and custom ligature choices. It's pretty incredible.
Thank you for the detail that Iosevka is a form of the name "Joseph." I've used this font for years and it never clicked for me--nor did the correct pronunciation, which it turns out was always listed on the readme.
Not trying to be negative, just confused: I don't really see how this font is "designed for symbol-heavy languages". The symbols look normal to me. Maybe the letters are a little more spaced? I'd love to be enlightened.
there are bounds to be many many operators and glyph combinations where things don't match properly. an example is the variable declaration and initialisation symbol in Go which combines colon and equal sign. if you use Myna and come across any such examples, please raise a feature request. i only focused on glyphs for languages i use personally. but if there is interest i am open to adding contextual alternates to give some alignment in cases where changing one glyph would disturb other combinations. of course you can always point out any rendering or design issues with singular glyphs too.
designer here. by symbol-heavy languages i mean languages like Perl and Haskell which make heavy use of symbols (sigils in Perl and operators in Haskell). Myna was designed after my frustration with other monospace fonts combined with my (self-imposed) inability to use ligatures.
I think it might be useful to put some screenshots of other fonts on your page, to show what symbol or alignment problems yours corrects. Because I've studied a lot of typeface design, and I can't really figure out what you're doing, what pain points you're trying to address.
Because when you say "and $, @, % seem ever mismatched?", I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. I certainly am curious though, since you went to all the work of building a new typeface!
And when you talk about fixing alignment, like all of these seem correctly vertically aligned with each other here on HN at least in monospace mode:
<->=+-~
So if you could demonstrate what it is fixing with reference to the most common monospace system/coding fonts, I think that would help a ton.
thanks for the suggestion. i'd think about adding screenshots of other fonts.
about the alignment, i think the README might give an impression that it's solely about vertical alignment, but it's more about uniform flow of characters along with some resemblance with an actual symbol (which we can not have in ASCII).
for example, take the `<-` combination. i think you're correctly pointing out that in most fonts they are indeed vertical-aligned properly. but there are other details (horizontal alignment, angle between strokes, weights, etc) which i found missing. in most monospace fonts, these less-than and more-than signs are not designed with the view that their most common usage is indeed not checking for inequality but for bitwise operators and struct pointer dereferencing (C), function declaration and monadic/applicative/functorial programming (Haskell), shell redirection (bash), function composition (OCaml, Elixir), tags (HTML), and countless others. if you think about it that way, it makes sense to not make the angle between strokes too small. many monospace fonts do it because they respect classical typographic conventions regarding space and design. the same goes for the designs for backquote, tilde, comma, colon. in most monospace fonts, backquote is so small it's barely visible and tilde looks too much like the hyphen, etc.
Myna is my attempt to break some of these conventions to make things look a little bit even for programmers.
i know the title can be a bit misleading but Myna is primarily ASCII.
languages which insist on using full Unicode like APL and Agda have bigger problems (availability of uniform glyphs and inconsistency with monospace design) on their plates. which imo is one reason why full Unicode editing hasn't really caught up.
Myna doesn't use any ligatures though. it would run on almost all terminals and editors.
Yeah, I realize that I was wrong about ligatures afterwards. The two plusses next to each other looked as if they are a single combined glyph, but they are in fact separate. I think this is the effect you were trying to reach, and it looks very slick.
J mostly looks good but [) looks almost like a fancy capital D which can be distracting and =# run together at smaller font sizes which is a little weird. Those are the only things that jump out at me but I did not look hard, overall I would say it is one of the better fonts I have tried for J.
The big problem that I am having with this font is that its narrowness makes it difficult to find a fallback font for APL/BQN that plays well.
Thanks for the link, at first glance seems like a fascinatingly rich font
(by the way, to overcome the char/font limit they can publish JuliaMono2 and 3 and 4 and then set those as fallback fonts to reach the full coverage...)
thanks for pointing it out. i mostly program in ASCII range. Myna covers a reasonable subset of Unicode but one can indeed use Julia as a fallback for Myna to cover Unicode if one wishes.
The kerning in the "Lorem" at the top drives me batty. It nearly looks like 2 words to my eye. I know that's super subjective and it probably doesn't bother anyone else at all. It's kind of a deal breaker for me, though.
i use this font basically everywhere and have become kinda blind to the defects. for me it looked best when glyphs are mostly centered (which makes them "genuinely monospace" if you catch my drift).
but you raise a valid point. it is not entirely subjective. some obviously grotesque (no pun) kerning would need to be changed in the next version. if you can point out some obvious ones i would urge you to create an issue.
thanks! in TypeScript, i've not noticed any glaring combination mismatches. i think most common combinations are covered by considering C and Perl. but feel free to try and report them if you find any.
I appreciate the effort, but the result kind of shows why usually symbols are aligned as they are. Dashes, colons, angle brackets — all look way too high next to lowercase letter. I assume this stems from trying to align everything with brackets, and those are aligned with uppercase letters kind of naturally. But I don't think the tradeoff is worth it.
i understand the point you raise. but i believe symbols are generally aligned as they are because most fonts are designed for text and many monospace fonts respect those typographic traditions.
but i think code is not text and breaking some tradition improves readability.
the dash (hyphen) is actually supposed to align with the greater than symbol to resemble the arrow (extremely common symbol in C and many functional languages).
Meta, but I've personally switched to a proportional font for my coding. Heresy, I know, but it feels wrong to have to look at code as if I'm coding on an 80 column terminal in 1960.
I don't know why "->" should render as an arrow when we could just use an actual Unicode arrow. If need be, have macros for your editors that allow you to convert the "->" into an actual arrow.
This is not valid C, though. The characters allowed for identifiers are defined in Unicode Standard Annex #31, and those easily understood as operators, like arrows, are not included.
it is partially a matter of design and code philosophy. many like the simplicity of ASCII and consider ligatures distracting.
but more than preference there is matter of availability and consistency. Unicode is not available for all possible glyph combinations and many times what we see in Unicode looks quite ugly in monospace because of the width constraint.
ligatures are also not supported everywhere. that is one of the reason i designed this.
Using Unicode would be awful. I have a button on my keyboard for every character I need. How do I type a unicode arrow? Oh, now I need editor macros? Or I need to get out a special keyboard per language?
Unicode is not there for you to necessarily use the whole thing. It's there so that everyone in the world can encode their text the same way, despite having a completely different set of characters on their keyboards.
Same way you type everything else - by pressing a button combination that corresponds to the symbol in your layout. Or by using an app that does it without changing the layout. Like your editor could insert → when you type fn () -> {}
Or you'd simply not type it and continue to use ->
> Or I need to get out a special keyboard per language?
No, your regular keyboard will work fine for any language.
> Unicode is not there for you to necessarily use the whole thing
The suggestion was about literally 1 char (maybe implicitly about a dozen more), why did you jump to the millions from "the whole thing"???
But I don't have a button that corresponds to "unicode arrow" and I don't particularly want one. I have only 10 digits and they're all accounted for with ubiquitous, regular keyboards that have been around for decades.
Having to use some app that converts two characters inserted in sequence into the correct character is a terrible idea. It makes me think of the Dvorak trend among geeks. I very nearly learnt Dvorak myself, but then a wise elder dissuaded me, reminding me how amazing it is to be able to type fast on any keyboard you come across, even if it might only be 90% of your theoretical maximum on the perfect keyboard. Sometimes local optima are good enough.
> But I don't have a button that corresponds to "unicode arrow"
You mean the label: well, take out your favorite marker and draw one on the side! But also, you don't have labels that correspond to these standard Mac layout symbols https://i.sstatic.net/ht0Tg.png
So? Should it be removed?
> ubiquitous, regular keyboards that have been around for decades.
All poorly designed, most even acknowledge that by adding an extra set of numbers at the side because the default numeric (and symbolic) row is so bad. Why is the 'why bother improve the awfulness' a great attitude?
> but then a wise elder dissuaded me, reminding me how amazing it is to be able to type fast on any keyboard you come across
There is nothing wise here, it's a bog standard rejection of any improvement. First of, you could still train yourself to use both. Second, if you're only using your own keyboards 99.9% of the time, there is nothing amazing about not being slowed down in those tiny percent of typing cases. Also, it's of course not literally `any` keyboard you come, that's such a myopic view - plenty of countries have different non-qwerty default layouts, so you wouldn't be able to enjoy your qwerty speed there
> only be 90% of your theoretical maximum on the perfect keyboard
What if it's 10% that will make you disabled in 20 years? After all, "speed" isn't the only factor here. Any "wise" man could appreciate the broader ergonomic implications...
> It's never "just one more".
If only you didn't cut off the quote you could've read "implicitly about a dozen more", but the most important part is the last that you failed to address about the millions
Yes the keyboard layouts we have nowadays are actually suboptimal for touch typing, but nobody has ever managed to change them on a global scale.
So why would one change the keyboard layouts just because somebody needs an arrow for programming? This is such a niche use case that it will never happen.
Also many programmers will not want to use the unicode arrow instead of ->, thats a personal choice and nothing else.
It would also be fatal to retrofit old languages like this since it would just create confusion for little benefit.
Not all code editing sessions are created equal. I dare you to deal with Unicode symbols in a vim session over SSH with a 1 second RTT, for example :).
Genuine question: is everyone coding on such high resolution displays and/or with font sizes so big nowadays? For me, the example screenshots are useless to see how the font would actually look like in my editor.
As a counter example, I always decrease the font-size everywhere. The annoying trend of bloating everything with whitespace, means that less and less stuff fits on the screen. But even HN is on 80% right now.
Hard to talk about "everyone" since I'm not aware of any large polls around this point. On a personal note, yes, considering that I'm 44, I tend to always increase font size everywhere: the code editor, the terminal, the browser, the OS itself and mobile phone.
It's unavoidable for me. I was making fun of those people with huge font sizes on phones 10 years ago. I'm almost one of them now.
I definitely increase my font size, so I'm not straining my eyes. Any monitor with a lower than about 120 PPI causes me strain, unless I really boost the size. For example I read HN at anywhere from 150-200%.
Not me. Ubuntu Mono is the only font I'm able to use because all others I've tried just take up so much space. I'm literally losing lines of text with other fonts. I need that density. I haven't tried this one yet, though.
The site should be more explicit about which characters are covered. I understand it's only ASCII, right? Although the example shows some currency signs that are definitely out of the 0-127 plane.
It would also be appreciated if you could suggest a fallback font for those glyphs not present in Myna, so that if I ever need to include the word "naïve" in a string, for example, the "ï" won't look as an alien character.
thanks for the feedback. almost all of the Latin extended and quite a reasonable subset of Unicode is covered. the word "naïve", for example, renders perfectly because the "i with diaeresis" is present in Myna. if you find any which are not covered and want them added, please create a feature request. about the fallback font, you can use any monospace font you like. i don't use any fallback generally because i work almost exclusively in the ASCII range in the editor.
I personally love Jetbrains Mono; it's been one of a kind for me and my tastes. I like it over Consolas (although this is one is pretty good on Windows), Fira Mono, Inconsolata, Plex Mono. But I can see the effort here and I'm definitely going to give this one a try! I've found that typefaces can change a lot depending on pixel alignment and rendering engines (i.e. ClearType, GDI, FreeType, Quartz... let pixel grid decide or not, or by how much...). So it's hard to tell if this is going to win me over without actually trying!
if you try it please feel free to create an issue if you find some rendering bug in your system. i have tested and used it extensively on Linux but not Windows or MacOS as much as i should.
I really appreciate that the symbols are clear and well-aligned but I do not find the font very attractive or legible unfortunately. I like the Go Mono font though so maybe it’s a “me” problem. :)
My favorite monospace font is "Ubuntu Mono" for ages.
As an engineer, I like to see -- for the lack of better word -- some taste instead of characters being too formal and too symmetric. Ubuntu and Ubuntu-Mono satisfy this to a good extent without being too much, like in comic sans.
The closest font with similar taste, which I found recently is Mononoki
I've also been using Ubuntu Mono for ages.
Must be 15 years now! I have tried many other fonts, just to see if I'd enjoy a change, but the most jarring thing is how much space all other fonts seem to have. Ubuntu Mono gives me way more lines on screen, without setting the font size far too small. Is the "condensed" property that is being mentioned in this thread? I've asked about this before but nobody has ever said "condensed".
yes, indeed. "condensed" means smaller width and less space between characters, in general. it allows for slightly more code to be shown on the screen horizontally.
thanks for pointing it out. i would need to consider that idea.
the symbols are all pure ASCII and are supposed to look normal. it is not a ligature font and neither focusses on Unicode symbols. the symbols are just more evenly adjusted with the letters and with each other.
That's something I really like about this front. I'm not a huge fan of ligatures and think they're counter productive. Makes it a bit harder to see the differences though, so I think a comparison would be great.
IBM Plex Mono has been my choice for years. I'm always open-minded regarding change and every time I hear of new fonts I do a comparison, but there's always something annoying in the new font that IBM Plex Mono does right. Still, I'm looking forward to doing the comparisons of the new fonts in hearing about on this post.
a few others have raised the same point. in my defense i can only say that i adore that particular style because it looks more like what i draw by hand.
I guess it depends on what you are used to. I draw them like “ʃ” by hand, and find the more squiggly style unnecessarily noisy visually. It makes the brace direction a little less obvious to see at first glance.
surprisingly enough for me, the exact same point was raised by others too. meanwhile, i was totally unaware that many would find it hard to read it as i never ever had any difficulty telling them apart even with the (admittedly baroque) design of the braces. if that is the only feature stopping you from trying this, please make a feature request. maybe i could issue a "disambiguous braces" variant.
I'm gonna raise another point, however. I think Myna's braces are easier to distinguish from each other: "(" and "{". After spending all day coding, they start to look very similar. I agree it might not be super beautiful, but for me, Myna has this advantage.
The curly braces are the one thing that really "pop out" from the font the moment I look at it. Even if I can agree they are pretty and even adorable, also visually noisy, distracting, and something that makes me not want to try the font out.
Being distinct from parens and brackets is obviously still desired and sorry I'm not a designer myself enough to give more specific feedback on how it could be improved.
thanks for the feedback. i didn't think about it until a few people commented here. if you use it and want it changed, please open a feature request. just like the curly braces, a disambiguating variant of Myna can be issued in the next release. i gather removing the left stroke at the bottom of the `l` would fix it for you. i think changing the `1` won't make sense as that's how it always is.
I like that it's relatively compact horizontally. If I had to nitpick, the curly braces look a bit too "wavy" for my taste, which doesn't quite match the hard angles on some other glyphs.
My favorite monospace font for the past 10+ years has been Iosevka Term ss08. I've tried many others over the years, and Iosevka is just perfect IMO.
Out of curiosity: what are the tools and the process to create a font today? It would be interesting to read a bit about that.
thanks for the feedback. about the braces please see another comment below. the issue of needlessly complicated braces has been raised quite a few times now. a variant could be considered if there is more interest.
this particular font is quite simple and doesn't contain any ligatures, etc. so most of the design is in Fontforge.
i didn't start from scratch. it started out as a customised version of Source Code Pro (released as Hera and currently archived in my profile) but i borrowed many glyphs from other fonts and modified many others to the point it became a different font. you can open the .sfd file directly in Fontforge to edit and modify it yourself.
The proper solution is, of course, to allow ←arrows→ (and, naturally, not trying to fit a variable peg into a monowidth whole)... maybe in the next generation of languages when the bottom level of typesetting quality is raised a bit
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