6 ms·

Five weights monospaced typeface for the benefit of charities

54 points by peterlind 10y ago

unwind 10y ago
That's an interesting license, and very nice of course. I got a bit confused, my initial reading and interpretation was that the intent is to have the actual font used in charity and relief efforts, I guess in signage. That's probably not what the author meant, though.
- dreamsofdragons 10y ago
  It doesn't appear so, but that would be a great 3rd option. Send in your charity registration, and get a free licence to use the font in your charities branding. That could serve to both help charities and build more awareness around the font, creating more sales, and more proceeds. You should mention it to them.
mattdennewitz 10y ago
spoiler: http://www.unhcr.org/ http://www.unhcr.org/ is the charity to whom the author intends to donate contributions.
tehrei 10y ago
Really nice and clean. Would prefer it if it included cyrillic characters and more latin ones to cover all European languages (e.g. Polish ł is missing, Czech š, č and probably several Hungarian letters).
27182818284 10y ago
About page throws up a big scary phishing warning in Google Chrome.
- dafeld 10y ago
  No, really? Shit. The only fish I want is Swedish fish. I need to investigate that, can't really see what that would be...
  - foxylion 10y ago
    In my Chrome it's fine.
  - hullo 10y ago
    I also don't see the warning. Toss your domains into Google webmaster central if you haven't, it'll give you info if it actually arises (and is just generally a good practice.)
    - dafeld 10y ago
      Thanks, I'll do that right away! I use Jekyll that generates a static html site. The only third party stuff I have on that page is a MailChimp-widget. So, I'll wait and see what Google webmaster tools will tell me.
nnq 10y ago
Really bad for code though... - the difference between uppercase and lowercase is too low making camelCase very hard to read - the colon is aligned to the left of its space making ":=" look horrible - "$" is hard to distinguish from "S" - [] have funny vertical alignment - every char is a bit wider than it should, wasting a lot of horizontal screen estate - what you want to avoid when working with 3+ columns of code on one screen Bad compared even to Ubuntu Mono. Very bad compared to Source Code Pro. Horrible compared to Consolas. But looks good on titles of articles referencing charity :) Seems like the intended use for a monospace font... right?
- plgs 10y ago
  And ^ results in a blank character.
  - dafeld 10y ago
    That's strange! I'll take a look, I know I designed that character! Thanks for the heads up!
- dafeld 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! It wasn't designed for code. It was more a educational project for me to learn interpolation to "easily" create several weights of the font based on two weights. At the same time I was looking for ways to help out in any way I could with the ongoing situation re refugees here in Europe. The "code" thing I thought was a bonus, and you're totally right. It might not work that well for code and it was never intended to compete with fonts that are intended to be used for code. Again, I'm super grateful for you feedback and will take a look at the examples of strange looking glyphs that you pointed out. Thanks a million!
- LukeShu 10y ago
  I think the only upper/lower case issue I have is with K--I think the other letters are fine. About the colon: In many cases in typesetting, shifting the colon to the left looks better, but not always. In TeX, there's ':' for ordinary colon and \colon for the left-shifted colon. Anyway, I guess it isn't a totally absurd choice if they're really trying to target a use other than code. I agree about $/S. I'm not sure what you're seeing with the vertical alignment of [], they look fine to me. More criticisms as a code font: At the size I'd be using for code, ` is nearly indistinguishable from '. At the size I'd be using for code, @ is just an odd circle-ish glyph (though I love it at larger sizes). And at small sizes it can be hard or impossible to distinguish it from © (I don't think you have ©, I think it's falling back to a different font).
z3t4 10y ago
If any font maker read this. I would like to have a "bitmap" monospace font as a true type font in the same size as Consolas 15px. With "bitmap" I mean high contrast super crisp, pixel perfect, that don't lose contrast without sub-pixel-antailias.
- a_e_k 10y ago
  Crispness was one of my primary motivations for learning to make my own programming font, Luculent [1][2]. Consolas is wider so the proportions aren't quite the same. But mine is superhinted to look good with no or limited antialiasing at 15 ppem, among other sizes. [1] http://eastfarthing.com/luculent http://eastfarthing.com/luculent [2] https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent
  - ComodoHacker 10y ago
    Good work, thank you! To my taste, it's a bit too dense for regular coding. Very nice for diffing/merging and for console.
  - a-nikolaev 10y ago
    This is a very nice typeface indeed! And uniquely beautiful.
  - z3t4 10y ago
    It looks good on many sizes with anti-alias turned off. But with anti-alias it's very thin and the contrast is bad.
ChicagoDave 10y ago
Well-intentioned, but needs work, especially from a coding perspective.
- dafeld 10y ago
  I totally agree to that! Never really thought this educational experiment would be featured on HN. It has kinda blown up! I'm glad you took a gander though!
dkuntz2 10y ago
There appears to be no carrot (^) character for the font
- jahewson 10y ago
  I assume you mean caret instead of a vegetable.
- ars 10y ago
  It's caret by the way.
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
can i donate to not have to use this ugly font?
DrTung 10y ago
Good news: the purchasing process works fine. Bad news: you cannot download the font (the supplied URL, when clicked, first goes to gumroad.com then to cloudfront.net which gives the error: Safari cannot open the page).
kazinator 10y ago
Microsoft Windows ships with a very nice font called Consolas. It is fantastic for programming. I use it everywhere, including Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu, usually in an 11 point size. I settled on this font while trying numerous monospaced fonts: everything I could get my hands on. Boy was I surprised at how I overlooked Consolas.
floatrock 10y ago
It's disturbing that the landing page does not mention at all what charity procedes go to. You need to go to the very bottom of the About page to finally find it's for http://www.unhcr.org http://www.unhcr.org The donation is also done in a sketchy way. Also near the bottom of the About page: > How does this charity thing work? > So far I'm using a solution that means I get payments sent to me to my Paypal and I personally make the donations to charities. I've chosen this way because it's easy. In other words, you're paypal'ing money to a stranger and hope that the money makes it's way to charity To the author's defense, he does have a "Are you to be trusted?" section that acknowledges this. The idea of a pay-what-you-like-for-charity-on-my-side-project idea is neat, but you need some degree of credibility or third-party to make it work. The next side project should be integrating against something that guarantees the promise of the donations.
- dafeld 10y ago
  It's a leap of faith, most definitely, and maybe a bit shady when viewed from an outsiders perspective. Just give money to a stranger? Yes. Shady indeed, I agree. But then again, if you chose to pay for it, which is your choice - you could download it for free - you actually get a font in five weights that has taken me a lot of time to craft. It's your choice. But you can trust me. It's the Internet - people wouldn't lie on the internet, no? And - I'll be the first to agree that this project needs more credibility and/or third-party involvement. I've already gotten the ball rolling on some partnerships with third parties for the future. Getting Hacker News'd wasn't even on my horizon. Superexciting! I was expecting friends and family to support this, like on my other design/charity project that I mention and link to on the about page.
JdeBP 10y ago
I read. I went elsewhere. Here's why. The pages do not tell me what I would be paying for. For me, it's important to know what font file format is used, because I need to know what and how many hoops I would have to jump through in order to obtain vt fonts. (Best outcome is two vt fonts: one normal+bold, one light+demibold. This is why the multiple weights interested me in the first place.) * https://freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt https://freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt * https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons#Font_Support https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons#Font_Support There's also no information about the character repertoire. Does it have everything in the WGL4? Or the W1G? Or less than either? What does it have?

54 points by peterlind 10y ago

That's an interesting license, and very nice of course. I got a bit confused, my initial reading and interpretation was that the intent is to have the actual font used in charity and relief efforts, I guess in signage. That's probably not what the author meant, though.

dreamsofdragons 10y ago
It doesn't appear so, but that would be a great 3rd option. Send in your charity registration, and get a free licence to use the font in your charities branding. That could serve to both help charities and build more awareness around the font, creating more sales, and more proceeds. You should mention it to them.

mattdennewitz 10y ago

spoiler: http://www.unhcr.org/ http://www.unhcr.org/ is the charity to whom the author intends to donate contributions.

tehrei 10y ago

Really nice and clean. Would prefer it if it included cyrillic characters and more latin ones to cover all European languages (e.g. Polish ł is missing, Czech š, č and probably several Hungarian letters).

27182818284 10y ago

About page throws up a big scary phishing warning in Google Chrome.

dafeld 10y ago
No, really? Shit. The only fish I want is Swedish fish. I need to investigate that, can't really see what that would be...
- foxylion 10y ago
  In my Chrome it's fine.
- hullo 10y ago
  I also don't see the warning. Toss your domains into Google webmaster central if you haven't, it'll give you info if it actually arises (and is just generally a good practice.)
  - dafeld 10y ago
    Thanks, I'll do that right away! I use Jekyll that generates a static html site. The only third party stuff I have on that page is a MailChimp-widget. So, I'll wait and see what Google webmaster tools will tell me.

nnq 10y ago

Really bad for code though... - the difference between uppercase and lowercase is too low making camelCase very hard to read - the colon is aligned to the left of its space making ":=" look horrible - "$" is hard to distinguish from "S" - [] have funny vertical alignment - every char is a bit wider than it should, wasting a lot of horizontal screen estate - what you want to avoid when working with 3+ columns of code on one screen Bad compared even to Ubuntu Mono. Very bad compared to Source Code Pro. Horrible compared to Consolas. But looks good on titles of articles referencing charity :) Seems like the intended use for a monospace font... right?

plgs 10y ago
And ^ results in a blank character.
- dafeld 10y ago
  That's strange! I'll take a look, I know I designed that character! Thanks for the heads up!
dafeld 10y ago
Thanks for the feedback! It wasn't designed for code. It was more a educational project for me to learn interpolation to "easily" create several weights of the font based on two weights. At the same time I was looking for ways to help out in any way I could with the ongoing situation re refugees here in Europe. The "code" thing I thought was a bonus, and you're totally right. It might not work that well for code and it was never intended to compete with fonts that are intended to be used for code. Again, I'm super grateful for you feedback and will take a look at the examples of strange looking glyphs that you pointed out. Thanks a million!
LukeShu 10y ago
I think the only upper/lower case issue I have is with K--I think the other letters are fine. About the colon: In many cases in typesetting, shifting the colon to the left looks better, but not always. In TeX, there's ':' for ordinary colon and \colon for the left-shifted colon. Anyway, I guess it isn't a totally absurd choice if they're really trying to target a use other than code. I agree about $/S. I'm not sure what you're seeing with the vertical alignment of [], they look fine to me. More criticisms as a code font: At the size I'd be using for code, ` is nearly indistinguishable from '. At the size I'd be using for code, @ is just an odd circle-ish glyph (though I love it at larger sizes). And at small sizes it can be hard or impossible to distinguish it from © (I don't think you have ©, I think it's falling back to a different font).

z3t4 10y ago

If any font maker read this. I would like to have a "bitmap" monospace font as a true type font in the same size as Consolas 15px. With "bitmap" I mean high contrast super crisp, pixel perfect, that don't lose contrast without sub-pixel-antailias.

a_e_k 10y ago
Crispness was one of my primary motivations for learning to make my own programming font, Luculent [1][2]. Consolas is wider so the proportions aren't quite the same. But mine is superhinted to look good with no or limited antialiasing at 15 ppem, among other sizes. [1] http://eastfarthing.com/luculent http://eastfarthing.com/luculent [2] https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  Good work, thank you! To my taste, it's a bit too dense for regular coding. Very nice for diffing/merging and for console.
- a-nikolaev 10y ago
  This is a very nice typeface indeed! And uniquely beautiful.
- z3t4 10y ago
  It looks good on many sizes with anti-alias turned off. But with anti-alias it's very thin and the contrast is bad.

ChicagoDave 10y ago

Well-intentioned, but needs work, especially from a coding perspective.

dafeld 10y ago
I totally agree to that! Never really thought this educational experiment would be featured on HN. It has kinda blown up! I'm glad you took a gander though!

dkuntz2 10y ago

There appears to be no carrot (^) character for the font

jahewson 10y ago
I assume you mean caret instead of a vegetable.
ars 10y ago
It's caret by the way.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago

can i donate to not have to use this ugly font?

DrTung 10y ago

Good news: the purchasing process works fine. Bad news: you cannot download the font (the supplied URL, when clicked, first goes to gumroad.com then to cloudfront.net which gives the error: Safari cannot open the page).

kazinator 10y ago

Microsoft Windows ships with a very nice font called Consolas. It is fantastic for programming. I use it everywhere, including Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu, usually in an 11 point size. I settled on this font while trying numerous monospaced fonts: everything I could get my hands on. Boy was I surprised at how I overlooked Consolas.

floatrock 10y ago

It's disturbing that the landing page does not mention at all what charity procedes go to. You need to go to the very bottom of the About page to finally find it's for http://www.unhcr.org http://www.unhcr.org The donation is also done in a sketchy way. Also near the bottom of the About page: > How does this charity thing work? > So far I'm using a solution that means I get payments sent to me to my Paypal and I personally make the donations to charities. I've chosen this way because it's easy. In other words, you're paypal'ing money to a stranger and hope that the money makes it's way to charity To the author's defense, he does have a "Are you to be trusted?" section that acknowledges this. The idea of a pay-what-you-like-for-charity-on-my-side-project idea is neat, but you need some degree of credibility or third-party to make it work. The next side project should be integrating against something that guarantees the promise of the donations.

dafeld 10y ago
It's a leap of faith, most definitely, and maybe a bit shady when viewed from an outsiders perspective. Just give money to a stranger? Yes. Shady indeed, I agree. But then again, if you chose to pay for it, which is your choice - you could download it for free - you actually get a font in five weights that has taken me a lot of time to craft. It's your choice. But you can trust me. It's the Internet - people wouldn't lie on the internet, no? And - I'll be the first to agree that this project needs more credibility and/or third-party involvement. I've already gotten the ball rolling on some partnerships with third parties for the future. Getting Hacker News'd wasn't even on my horizon. Superexciting! I was expecting friends and family to support this, like on my other design/charity project that I mention and link to on the about page.

JdeBP 10y ago

I read. I went elsewhere. Here's why. The pages do not tell me what I would be paying for. For me, it's important to know what font file format is used, because I need to know what and how many hoops I would have to jump through in order to obtain vt fonts. (Best outcome is two vt fonts: one normal+bold, one light+demibold. This is why the multiple weights interested me in the first place.) * https://freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt https://freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt * https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons#Font_Support https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons#Font_Support There's also no information about the character repertoire. Does it have everything in the WGL4? Or the W1G? Or less than either? What does it have?