I'd not spotted that before reading your comment, and went looking expecting a double-width ligature, which would be quite cool. Squeezing the ligature into a single character width seems sub-optimal for a monospaced font.
I've done the same with my own programming font (mononoki http://madmalik.github.io/mononoki/ )
There is a difference between a ligature that a font may provide when you type in f and i and the unicode point 'LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FI', that is in there for historical reasons.
the first one would make sense as double width character, the second one should be single width to show, that the unicode point 'LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FI' is meant
No, it's not recommended for coding; it's a display font, to be used for headlines, titles, and the like, things where you want a little bit of stylistic flair. Here's the description from the link:
About
Space Mono is an original fixed-width type family designed by Colophon
Foundry for Google Design. It supports a Latin Extended glyph set,
enabling typesetting for English and other Western European languages.
Developed for editorial use in headline and display typography, the
letterforms infuse a geometric foundation and grotesque details with
qualities often found in headline typefaces of the 1960s (See:
Microgramma[1], Eurostile[2]), many of which have since been co-opted by
science fiction films, television, and literature.
Typographic features include old-style figures, superscript and subscript
numerals, fractions, center-height and cap-height currency symbols,
directional arrows, and multiple stylistic alternates.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgramma_(typeface)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile
I've been using Monaco for years. Something about it is very pleasing to me. However, I'm sort of bored with it and haven't been able to find a suitable replacement.
Chiming in to agree. I like how you can customize certain characters (like `*' being at the top or in the middle of text, `g' being one or two stories, `0' having a slash or dot).
Gotta say, wasn't that interested when I clicked the link thinking "yet another programming font". I must have 30 or so installed and yet still end up using Consolas (mostly because it's the default in my IDE and I've had to reinstall a few times this last year).
I will say, though, that I have always hated the traditional "a" used in fonts, preferring the more simplified one that's typically used in handwriting, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was one of the very few that use my preferred style. Yes, it can be ambiguous with the "o" character (though this has never been a problem in practice with the font configured even at the small sizes I use) but I find it more ascetically pleasing for whatever reason.
I should have specified the fonts I was referring to were monospace fonts, specifically, which out of the 12 I've got installed on my machine I've got only one is the "truncated 'd'" style, unfortunately.
If you are aware of others, please post links, I'd love to have a few more.
That style is usually called “single story a”. Monaco is a common monospaced typeface that uses it. I suspect that style is less common because at small sizes it's easily confused with o.
I've been using Triplicate (http://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html) for a few years and it's still my favorite by far. Not free, but really reasonably priced. (Note there's a special variant suitable for coding, you can see examples in Racket in the PDF specimen.)
No, I mean zero smearing with/without anti-aliasing and pixel-perfect versions of the font that fit exactly into the raster. This is certainly a subjective matter, so it's moot to discuss why I fall into the crowd that finds pixel-perfect bitmap monospace fonts most pleasing. Thought it's telling if you see that even Mac users sometimes prefer misc-fixed: https://monkey.org/~marius/beautiful-fixed-width-fonts-for-o...
I can't verify that, but it's kinda unfortunate that to have clear text rendering we have to process a much larger number of pixels, though it may be the logical solution. I hope you're right.
I think it's inevitable as per the laws of physics/optics/etc -- as long as fonts have curves, to have them render clear we need to process a much larger number of pixels.
I guess it's comes from information theory (Shannon/Nyquist etc).
This looks cool, I especially like the lower-case characters (with the possible exception of the descender on the g). Also, the idea of using a monospaced font as a display font rather than a font for restricted environments (terminals) is new to me.
This may be a tangent, but speaking of mono fonts sponsored by big SV firms: Am I the only one who would like to see Apple's San Francisco Mono (which they stealthily debuted at WWDC) released properly (i.e. as an independent font file)? It's currently in the Xcode preview, but you can't use it anywhere else.
Font's cool, but damn, gotta remark on Google's UI polish in (what I assume is) Material. It's so smooth and fluid -- I'd love to create something that coherent.
I'd fork it and add a sample of https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font (more like a terminal font than a programming one) if I had a Windows machine with Sublime Text on hand. Can you add it for me?
http://imgur.com/4tJkbaK