10 ms·

Recursive, a free variable font for code and UI, now on Google Fonts

376 points by thundernixon 6y ago

thundernixon 6y ago
You can also learn more about Recursive & configure advanced Google Fonts API calls on the Recursive minisite: https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/
- enhdless 6y ago
  I really enjoyed reading about your design process! I'm also a big fan of sign-painting aesthetics. Can you elaborate more on the technical side? Once you have your designs and sketches, how do you go about digitizing those and creating the actual font?
phaedryx 6y ago
There are several things I look for in a "code" font: distinct 0 vs O, distinct l vs 1, readability, etc. I don't think I'd use this for code, but I might for UI. Edit: it seems that the variations are more code-oriented when you shift the code more "MONO" (based on experimentation on its website)
- brettermeier 6y ago
  With parameter mono set to min. 0.5, you have a distinct 0 and O. And also serifs, nice font.
  - ebg13 6y ago
    What is "parameter mono set to min. 0.5" and where do you find that? [edit: Oh I see. It's not on the linked page but on the font's homepage.]
    - Twirrim 6y ago
      Yeah, there's a lot of detail that is missing by linking us to the Google Font website instead of the font's website, https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/
  - phaedryx 6y ago
    I like 0 vs O better, but 1 vs l worse: https://imgur.com/a/1tXx8aH https://imgur.com/a/1tXx8aH
    - thundernixon 6y ago
      There is a stylistic set which allows you to get an unambiguous 1 vs l (ss05). See: https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive#opentype-features https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive#opentype-features Also, there are fonts made specifically for code which have code ligatures & the simple l, f, 6, & 9 frozen in, if you like these features but don’t want to mess with OpenType features (or if your code editor doesn’t support that). https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_mono-for-code https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_m...
- dylan604 6y ago
  Came to say the same thing. I placed an uppercase letter 'O' next to a zero in the preview text. They are very similar looking. I much prefer fonts with a dot or slash in the zero. If they go ahead and place a bar across the number seven and letter 'Z', I'm a bigger fan
- ape4 6y ago
  In fact instead of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" there should be a standard sentence for code fonts using those characters. Zero[0] = Oh[0]; One[1] = El[l]; or something ;)
  - phaedryx 6y ago
    yes! Il|i! and DO0Q
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
chrisdalke 6y ago
The Google Fonts page doesn't really do justice to how dynamic this font is -- https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/ has a live demo that shows more of the options, maybe the link should be changed to their demo. There are four dimensions and a few other flags that the font can be adjusted by in CSS: natural-width to fixed-width, Linear to "Casual", Font weight, Font slant, and cursive variants. By tweaking any of the variable font parameters it you can get anything in the range of a "serious" monospace font to a more casual font useful for UI mockups. I don't spend a huge amount of time in the font design world but this is one of the first variable fonts I've seen that feels less like a gimmicky demo and more like a seriously versatile tool, really great work!
- airstrike 6y ago
  The question is: do we need flexible fonts? Other than fine-tuning the monospace font to fit your exact preferences given the hours you spend coding, everything else seems to be a matter of just picking an appropriate type that fits your project
  - chrisdalke 6y ago
    Just speculating, but this could help in any web project where you're including multiple font weights/styles -- Currently that involves building a CSS font-family from multiple font files which have a lot of redundant information. With a variable font, your font family could pull from a single font file and use the font parameters to tweak different styles. The HN audience loves to discuss the bloat in web design -- If you can reduce 500kb of font-<heavy, bold, italic, light> files into a single file that interpolates between font vectors dynamically, that goes a long way to avoiding excessive resources. And you also get the benefit of being able to tweak the parameters of each font style without changing out static files. For example, with Recursive the entire static font family come in at 12.8mb, while the dynamic font family in a single file is 1.45mb. Obviously you wouldn't load up every variant and Recursive is a very large font, but I could certainly imagine replacing ~8-10 font files with a single variable font.
    - 6y ago
perardi 6y ago
Wow. That is cool. If you have a big negative slant, and auto cursive enabled, you get much more of a humanist sans-serif, versus a neo-grotesque without those parameters. That's a huge amount of character to build into one single font. And the absolute max size for the font is 281kb, and a more pared down version is about 100kb. Yes, I know, you'll protest, page bloat! But if I wanted to use a non-variable font, each individual font would be around 20kb, so if I needed a pretty typical stack of 300-400-600 font weights, with matching italics, I'm looking at 120kb, with individual requests for each weight.
- thundernixon 6y ago
  Thanks, it has been a fun project to work on, and you are correct about variable fonts offering more range in fewer bytes! Another thing worth considering in a “page bloat” debate is that while a very extensive variable font is maybe 300 kb, that size is fairly average for a JPEG, but you can do far more with a variable font.
anotherfounder 6y ago
This is so great! Has anyone put out a good variable Serif font that is taking advantage of all the variables?
- thundernixon 6y ago
  This is one really good serif variable font: http://www.gt-alpina.com/ http://www.gt-alpina.com/ Different variable fonts use different variable “axes” – choosing what parameters can/should be variable is just another design decision in making a font.
sipjca 6y ago
This is by far the coolest font I’ve seen. Having this level of customizability in one font seems like a fantastic idea
jordache 6y ago
why is this a big deal? can someone provide insight?
- kanobo 6y ago
  Try out the sliders on https://www.recursive.design https://www.recursive.design
khaledh 6y ago
I know this font is about versatility, but when it comes to a coding font I have yet to find something that beats JetBrains Mono (and I've tried many coding fonts). https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
- hmhrex 6y ago
  I haven't seen this yet. Just downloaded and installed for VS Code and it makes a huge difference. Thanks for the recommendation!
  - sytelus 6y ago
    Which exact variant are you using? Could you please copy past your setting line?
- jerrygoyal 6y ago
  On windows, I tried dozens of trending fonts like fira code, new ms font, jetbrains etc but nothing looks more natural to read than Consolas (and also Roboto mono)
  - chrysoprace 6y ago
    I think Cascadia Code[0] is pretty close but I wish Microsoft would re-release Consolas with ligatures. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
  - whatever_dude 6y ago
    Exactly same. I try different fonts from time to time but always end up going back to Consolas.
- edwintorok 6y ago
  Since we're onto recommendations, I've been using 'Go Mono' for a while: https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/go-mono https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/go-mono https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts Wish the 'Recursive' font had a 'Slab-Serif' slider too, would've been interesting to compare.
kanobo 6y ago
The designers did an amazing job. Setting --mono to 1.0 makes it look very similar to Jetbrain's font which I like.
- ChristianGeek 6y ago
  The lowercase “m”, for one, looks terrible though. It’s a cool demo but I’d never use it.
  - thundernixon 6y ago
    Can you perhaps say more about what you dislike about the lowercase “m”? It has to be extremely condensed to fit into a fixed-width space, just the same as any other monospaced font for code.
m0zg 6y ago
Only latin glyphs. Пиздец.
- zvr 6y ago
  ακριβώς!
  - thundernixon 6y ago
    Thanks for checking out the font. As the main maker of it, I would love for it to include Cyrillic & Greek characters (and Arabic & Thai & more...), but this font’s variable axes mean that it is veeery slow to draw additional characters for (they have to be drawn in 12 or 24 different styles for things to work). But: 1. If someone wants to contribute the work in a PR, or the funding for work, I would be happy to extend the character set. 2. The font sticks to the most common width for monospaced fonts, so many fonts that do include Cyrillic & Greek glyphs will work elegantly as fallbacks. I recommend IBM Plex Mono, for one free + open-source option that is particularly good. Or, of course, you could just use Plex for everything, and you wouldn’t be wrong.
pgtan 6y ago
Since I have to do lots of TeX editing in emacs, every "coding" font disqualifies, if it doesn't have at least polytonic greek and cyrillic glyphs. So, misc-fixed forever!
unicornporn 6y ago
I really must recommend Inter[1]. It's also open-source and available as variable. [1] https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/
- flixic 6y ago
  Inter is almost as good as Apple's SF, and with a much more permissive license. It's my default when designing apps for the web. I used to default to "system font stack", but that was always because SF is such a great font. Defaulting to Ubuntu font on Ubuntu is... unfortunate. Luckily, Inter is fantastic, and it can be fantastic on every OS.
Mizza 6y ago
The capital 'A' renders very strangely for me. Firefox, OSX. https://i.imgur.com/DmxoWeM.png https://i.imgur.com/DmxoWeM.png
- thundernixon 6y ago
  Strange, usually if a font is rendered with that issue, it would be in several other letters, as well. That is often from the font renderer using an “even-odd rule” in vector rendering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule What is your OS & browser version?
vz8 6y ago
Die-hard fan of Iosevka[0], a narrow monospace font family (regular and term) and nerd-font patched varieties [1]. Just love how they display in emacs gui on a 4k display. [0] https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ [1] https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-fonts/Iosevka https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-...
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  The Slab variant is still my go-to, even after paying for things like Operator Mono and Pragmata Pro.
- aasci 6y ago
  hell yeah, same here. when i heard first of iosevka, i didn't like it at all, and it wasn't til a few months and the every-so-often shoutouts later that i understood. it is the best programming font i've ever used.
- cjbprime 6y ago
  Same, I've been enjoying using the proportional Iosevka Aile as a coding font too.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- axilmar 6y ago
  Oh man. I've tried iosevka too, it's very ugly. Source Code Pro looks so much better both in Visual Studio and in Notepad++.
alexeiz 6y ago
Neither monospace variant looks good in a Linux terminal or a text editor. Linux is very peculiar about rendering fonts, and this font is likely designed for macos. I noticed that this font doesn't have powerline symbols which makes it even less usable in the terminal.
coronadisaster 6y ago
Can you download the font to the server and avoid Google on each page load? Or is it a copyright issue?
- usr1106 6y ago
  Good question. I might guess it's as free as most things in surveillance capitalism. Well, even if it were legal to host it yourself, most won't do it, so Google still cashs in on the surveillance side.
  - thundernixon 6y ago
    The font is under the OFL license, and you can definitely host it on your own server, no connection to Google required.
- detaro 6y ago
  The license is listed on the page.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
...Am I the only one who, for some fonts, has issues with the overlapping section of the "A" character in Firefox? https://i.ibb.co/8sbMvL3/Screen-Shot-2020-07-23-at-6-49-52-PM.png https://i.ibb.co/8sbMvL3/Screen-Shot-2020-07-23-at-6-49-52-P... Recursive isn't the only font where this happens, but I did notice it for Recursive. I've also observed this on more than one computer, so it's not just my machine!
- thundernixon 6y ago
  Nope, you are not the only one! That is an issue of the font renderer using an “even-odd rule” in vector rendering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule What is your OS & OS version? This has generally gotten better over the past couple of years. You can also use the static fonts, however, which don’t have vector overlaps, and Will therefore avoid this issue. In fact, it you were working on print design, it would probably still be better to use static fonts at this point.
  - mmmrk 6y ago
    Maybe it helps to set the OVERLAP_* flags as described in the glyf table spec?
c3534l 6y ago
It looks super unbalanced to me. Letters have different visual weights at different parts for seemingly no reason at all.
greg7mdp 6y ago
Would be nice for a "code" font if the '+' character was displayed correctly.
- thundernixon 6y ago
  Ha, yeah, that is a Google Fonts UI bug, and I’ve sent a message to folks over there about it. The font has math symbols that render well. :-) Please check out the font and try the preview/tester at: https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/
sings 6y ago
> The characters within both subfamilies, Sans & Mono, maintain the exact same width across all font styles, independently of the values set on the Weight, Casual, Slant, and Cursive axes. It’s very impressive that they have managed to duplex the styles across all four dimensions. This is very difficult to do across a wide range of weights while keeping the whole family cohesive.
jameshart 6y ago
The google page seems not to support the '+' glyph, which at first seemed like a bit of a failing in a programming font - but then I remembered how many bugs string concatenation was responsible for and I realized they might be onto something. Sadly, the version on https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/ seems to include the symbol. (spoiler: it's nothing to do with the font - it looks like it's actually a URL encoding glitch with the way the page manages the preview text - it can't round-trip a + symbol correctly)
squid_demon 6y ago
Why isn't the plus character, '+', valid? Shows up as one of those empty box thingies. Maybe it is just a limitation of the preview? Or does the font really not include a plus character?
- thundernixon 6y ago
  Haha, well spotted. Yeah, it seems to maybe be an issue of how Google Fonts sends preview text to the URL, and the “+” conflicts with the general separator. I’ve sent a message to the folks over there, and hopefully they will put it in their backlog to fix. The font definitely has the “+” symbol, along with many other math & currency glyphs (and many more). Please check it out (and try the preview/tester) at: https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/
Igelau 6y ago
m and @ really suffer as you crank up MONO. I like how the 0 gets a line as soon as MONO ≥ .50 Not a fan of those inktraps at heavier weights. If it's for UI and code, why does it need inktraps?
- thundernixon 6y ago
  Small type can lose definition on screen just as much as in print, so “inktraps” are really just there to help make things more crisp in text. Of course, they are there just as much for aesthetics if the type is used at large sizes.
Shorel 6y ago
No Cyrillic support :/
kalyantm 6y ago
Any comments from someone using this font as a daily driver? I cant seem to move on from Source Code Pro (not that i'm looking to, just tried a couple and found myself clinging to Source Code Pro at the end of the day) This looks nice (similar to what I thought about JetBrains Mono)
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  I tried the mono version but a double forward slash glitches and overlays the next two characters - which kinda makes it unusable for anyone touching the web.
  - thundernixon 6y ago
    Can I ask what software you ran into that issue with? Probably, it was a strict-monospace environment, like vim in a terminal. I have created code-specific fonts to deal with this issue: there are fonts made specifically for code which have code ligatures & the simple l, f, 6, & 9 frozen in, if you like these features but don’t want to mess with OpenType features (or if your code editor doesn’t support that). https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_m.. https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_m.... The issue doesn’t occur in web browsers, as far as I know, as they support proportional type (include mostly-mono families with a few proportional glyphs).
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      macOS Terminal with any of Rec Mono Duotone, Rec Mono Casual, Rec Mono Linear, and Rec Mono SemiCasual installed from `~/git/recursive/fonts/Recursive-Beta_1.053/Recursive_Code`.
mrich 6y ago
Some of the variants look a bit like Comic Sans.
- thundernixon 6y ago
  A beloved classic. Thanks for trying it out, and thanks for the kind words!
usr1106 6y ago
Some background https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/a-brushstroke-variable-font-taken-to-its-extreme/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/a-brushstroke-variable-font-tak...
Pinus 6y ago
Does fontconfig support this? I know that you can set boolean flags for some fonts (like old-style vs. lining numbers) using the fontfeature property, but what about the "casl" axis, for example?
amai 6y ago
Supports over 200 languages but not Greek and Russian.

376 points by thundernixon 6y ago

You can also learn more about Recursive & configure advanced Google Fonts API calls on the Recursive minisite: https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/

enhdless 6y ago
I really enjoyed reading about your design process! I'm also a big fan of sign-painting aesthetics. Can you elaborate more on the technical side? Once you have your designs and sketches, how do you go about digitizing those and creating the actual font?

phaedryx 6y ago

There are several things I look for in a "code" font: distinct 0 vs O, distinct l vs 1, readability, etc. I don't think I'd use this for code, but I might for UI. Edit: it seems that the variations are more code-oriented when you shift the code more "MONO" (based on experimentation on its website)

brettermeier 6y ago
With parameter mono set to min. 0.5, you have a distinct 0 and O. And also serifs, nice font.
- ebg13 6y ago
  What is "parameter mono set to min. 0.5" and where do you find that? [edit: Oh I see. It's not on the linked page but on the font's homepage.]
  - Twirrim 6y ago
    Yeah, there's a lot of detail that is missing by linking us to the Google Font website instead of the font's website, https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/
- phaedryx 6y ago
  I like 0 vs O better, but 1 vs l worse: https://imgur.com/a/1tXx8aH https://imgur.com/a/1tXx8aH
  - thundernixon 6y ago
    There is a stylistic set which allows you to get an unambiguous 1 vs l (ss05). See: https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive#opentype-features https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive#opentype-features Also, there are fonts made specifically for code which have code ligatures & the simple l, f, 6, & 9 frozen in, if you like these features but don’t want to mess with OpenType features (or if your code editor doesn’t support that). https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_mono-for-code https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_m...
dylan604 6y ago
Came to say the same thing. I placed an uppercase letter 'O' next to a zero in the preview text. They are very similar looking. I much prefer fonts with a dot or slash in the zero. If they go ahead and place a bar across the number seven and letter 'Z', I'm a bigger fan
ape4 6y ago
In fact instead of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" there should be a standard sentence for code fonts using those characters. Zero[0] = Oh[0]; One[1] = El[l]; or something ;)
- phaedryx 6y ago
  yes! Il|i! and DO0Q
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

chrisdalke 6y ago

The Google Fonts page doesn't really do justice to how dynamic this font is -- https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/ has a live demo that shows more of the options, maybe the link should be changed to their demo. There are four dimensions and a few other flags that the font can be adjusted by in CSS: natural-width to fixed-width, Linear to "Casual", Font weight, Font slant, and cursive variants. By tweaking any of the variable font parameters it you can get anything in the range of a "serious" monospace font to a more casual font useful for UI mockups. I don't spend a huge amount of time in the font design world but this is one of the first variable fonts I've seen that feels less like a gimmicky demo and more like a seriously versatile tool, really great work!

airstrike 6y ago
The question is: do we need flexible fonts? Other than fine-tuning the monospace font to fit your exact preferences given the hours you spend coding, everything else seems to be a matter of just picking an appropriate type that fits your project
- chrisdalke 6y ago
  Just speculating, but this could help in any web project where you're including multiple font weights/styles -- Currently that involves building a CSS font-family from multiple font files which have a lot of redundant information. With a variable font, your font family could pull from a single font file and use the font parameters to tweak different styles. The HN audience loves to discuss the bloat in web design -- If you can reduce 500kb of font-<heavy, bold, italic, light> files into a single file that interpolates between font vectors dynamically, that goes a long way to avoiding excessive resources. And you also get the benefit of being able to tweak the parameters of each font style without changing out static files. For example, with Recursive the entire static font family come in at 12.8mb, while the dynamic font family in a single file is 1.45mb. Obviously you wouldn't load up every variant and Recursive is a very large font, but I could certainly imagine replacing ~8-10 font files with a single variable font.
  - 6y ago

perardi 6y ago

Wow. That is cool. If you have a big negative slant, and auto cursive enabled, you get much more of a humanist sans-serif, versus a neo-grotesque without those parameters. That's a huge amount of character to build into one single font. And the absolute max size for the font is 281kb, and a more pared down version is about 100kb. Yes, I know, you'll protest, page bloat! But if I wanted to use a non-variable font, each individual font would be around 20kb, so if I needed a pretty typical stack of 300-400-600 font weights, with matching italics, I'm looking at 120kb, with individual requests for each weight.

thundernixon 6y ago
Thanks, it has been a fun project to work on, and you are correct about variable fonts offering more range in fewer bytes! Another thing worth considering in a “page bloat” debate is that while a very extensive variable font is maybe 300 kb, that size is fairly average for a JPEG, but you can do far more with a variable font.

anotherfounder 6y ago

This is so great! Has anyone put out a good variable Serif font that is taking advantage of all the variables?

thundernixon 6y ago
This is one really good serif variable font: http://www.gt-alpina.com/ http://www.gt-alpina.com/ Different variable fonts use different variable “axes” – choosing what parameters can/should be variable is just another design decision in making a font.

sipjca 6y ago

This is by far the coolest font I’ve seen. Having this level of customizability in one font seems like a fantastic idea

jordache 6y ago

why is this a big deal? can someone provide insight?

kanobo 6y ago
Try out the sliders on https://www.recursive.design https://www.recursive.design

khaledh 6y ago

I know this font is about versatility, but when it comes to a coding font I have yet to find something that beats JetBrains Mono (and I've tried many coding fonts). https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/

hmhrex 6y ago
I haven't seen this yet. Just downloaded and installed for VS Code and it makes a huge difference. Thanks for the recommendation!
- sytelus 6y ago
  Which exact variant are you using? Could you please copy past your setting line?
jerrygoyal 6y ago
On windows, I tried dozens of trending fonts like fira code, new ms font, jetbrains etc but nothing looks more natural to read than Consolas (and also Roboto mono)
- chrysoprace 6y ago
  I think Cascadia Code[0] is pretty close but I wish Microsoft would re-release Consolas with ligatures. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
- whatever_dude 6y ago
  Exactly same. I try different fonts from time to time but always end up going back to Consolas.
edwintorok 6y ago
Since we're onto recommendations, I've been using 'Go Mono' for a while: https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/go-mono https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/go-mono https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts Wish the 'Recursive' font had a 'Slab-Serif' slider too, would've been interesting to compare.

kanobo 6y ago

The designers did an amazing job. Setting --mono to 1.0 makes it look very similar to Jetbrain's font which I like.

ChristianGeek 6y ago
The lowercase “m”, for one, looks terrible though. It’s a cool demo but I’d never use it.
- thundernixon 6y ago
  Can you perhaps say more about what you dislike about the lowercase “m”? It has to be extremely condensed to fit into a fixed-width space, just the same as any other monospaced font for code.

m0zg 6y ago

Only latin glyphs. Пиздец.

zvr 6y ago
ακριβώς!
- thundernixon 6y ago
  Thanks for checking out the font. As the main maker of it, I would love for it to include Cyrillic & Greek characters (and Arabic & Thai & more...), but this font’s variable axes mean that it is veeery slow to draw additional characters for (they have to be drawn in 12 or 24 different styles for things to work). But: 1. If someone wants to contribute the work in a PR, or the funding for work, I would be happy to extend the character set. 2. The font sticks to the most common width for monospaced fonts, so many fonts that do include Cyrillic & Greek glyphs will work elegantly as fallbacks. I recommend IBM Plex Mono, for one free + open-source option that is particularly good. Or, of course, you could just use Plex for everything, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

pgtan 6y ago

Since I have to do lots of TeX editing in emacs, every "coding" font disqualifies, if it doesn't have at least polytonic greek and cyrillic glyphs. So, misc-fixed forever!

unicornporn 6y ago

I really must recommend Inter[1]. It's also open-source and available as variable. [1] https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/

flixic 6y ago
Inter is almost as good as Apple's SF, and with a much more permissive license. It's my default when designing apps for the web. I used to default to "system font stack", but that was always because SF is such a great font. Defaulting to Ubuntu font on Ubuntu is... unfortunate. Luckily, Inter is fantastic, and it can be fantastic on every OS.

Mizza 6y ago

The capital 'A' renders very strangely for me. Firefox, OSX. https://i.imgur.com/DmxoWeM.png https://i.imgur.com/DmxoWeM.png

thundernixon 6y ago
Strange, usually if a font is rendered with that issue, it would be in several other letters, as well. That is often from the font renderer using an “even-odd rule” in vector rendering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule What is your OS & browser version?

vz8 6y ago

Die-hard fan of Iosevka[0], a narrow monospace font family (regular and term) and nerd-font patched varieties [1]. Just love how they display in emacs gui on a 4k display. [0] https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ [1] https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-fonts/Iosevka https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-...

FireBeyond 6y ago
The Slab variant is still my go-to, even after paying for things like Operator Mono and Pragmata Pro.
aasci 6y ago
hell yeah, same here. when i heard first of iosevka, i didn't like it at all, and it wasn't til a few months and the every-so-often shoutouts later that i understood. it is the best programming font i've ever used.
cjbprime 6y ago
Same, I've been enjoying using the proportional Iosevka Aile as a coding font too.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
axilmar 6y ago
Oh man. I've tried iosevka too, it's very ugly. Source Code Pro looks so much better both in Visual Studio and in Notepad++.

alexeiz 6y ago

Neither monospace variant looks good in a Linux terminal or a text editor. Linux is very peculiar about rendering fonts, and this font is likely designed for macos. I noticed that this font doesn't have powerline symbols which makes it even less usable in the terminal.

coronadisaster 6y ago

Can you download the font to the server and avoid Google on each page load? Or is it a copyright issue?

usr1106 6y ago
Good question. I might guess it's as free as most things in surveillance capitalism. Well, even if it were legal to host it yourself, most won't do it, so Google still cashs in on the surveillance side.
- thundernixon 6y ago
  The font is under the OFL license, and you can definitely host it on your own server, no connection to Google required.
detaro 6y ago
The license is listed on the page.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

...Am I the only one who, for some fonts, has issues with the overlapping section of the "A" character in Firefox? https://i.ibb.co/8sbMvL3/Screen-Shot-2020-07-23-at-6-49-52-PM.png https://i.ibb.co/8sbMvL3/Screen-Shot-2020-07-23-at-6-49-52-P... Recursive isn't the only font where this happens, but I did notice it for Recursive. I've also observed this on more than one computer, so it's not just my machine!

thundernixon 6y ago
Nope, you are not the only one! That is an issue of the font renderer using an “even-odd rule” in vector rendering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule What is your OS & OS version? This has generally gotten better over the past couple of years. You can also use the static fonts, however, which don’t have vector overlaps, and Will therefore avoid this issue. In fact, it you were working on print design, it would probably still be better to use static fonts at this point.
- mmmrk 6y ago
  Maybe it helps to set the OVERLAP_* flags as described in the glyf table spec?

c3534l 6y ago

It looks super unbalanced to me. Letters have different visual weights at different parts for seemingly no reason at all.

greg7mdp 6y ago

Would be nice for a "code" font if the '+' character was displayed correctly.

thundernixon 6y ago
Ha, yeah, that is a Google Fonts UI bug, and I’ve sent a message to folks over there about it. The font has math symbols that render well. :-) Please check out the font and try the preview/tester at: https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/

sings 6y ago

> The characters within both subfamilies, Sans & Mono, maintain the exact same width across all font styles, independently of the values set on the Weight, Casual, Slant, and Cursive axes. It’s very impressive that they have managed to duplex the styles across all four dimensions. This is very difficult to do across a wide range of weights while keeping the whole family cohesive.

jameshart 6y ago

The google page seems not to support the '+' glyph, which at first seemed like a bit of a failing in a programming font - but then I remembered how many bugs string concatenation was responsible for and I realized they might be onto something. Sadly, the version on https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/ seems to include the symbol. (spoiler: it's nothing to do with the font - it looks like it's actually a URL encoding glitch with the way the page manages the preview text - it can't round-trip a + symbol correctly)

squid_demon 6y ago

Why isn't the plus character, '+', valid? Shows up as one of those empty box thingies. Maybe it is just a limitation of the preview? Or does the font really not include a plus character?

thundernixon 6y ago
Haha, well spotted. Yeah, it seems to maybe be an issue of how Google Fonts sends preview text to the URL, and the “+” conflicts with the general separator. I’ve sent a message to the folks over there, and hopefully they will put it in their backlog to fix. The font definitely has the “+” symbol, along with many other math & currency glyphs (and many more). Please check it out (and try the preview/tester) at: https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/

Igelau 6y ago

m and @ really suffer as you crank up MONO. I like how the 0 gets a line as soon as MONO ≥ .50 Not a fan of those inktraps at heavier weights. If it's for UI and code, why does it need inktraps?

thundernixon 6y ago
Small type can lose definition on screen just as much as in print, so “inktraps” are really just there to help make things more crisp in text. Of course, they are there just as much for aesthetics if the type is used at large sizes.

Shorel 6y ago

No Cyrillic support :/

kalyantm 6y ago

Any comments from someone using this font as a daily driver? I cant seem to move on from Source Code Pro (not that i'm looking to, just tried a couple and found myself clinging to Source Code Pro at the end of the day) This looks nice (similar to what I thought about JetBrains Mono)

zimpenfish 6y ago
I tried the mono version but a double forward slash glitches and overlays the next two characters - which kinda makes it unusable for anyone touching the web.
- thundernixon 6y ago
  Can I ask what software you ran into that issue with? Probably, it was a strict-monospace environment, like vim in a terminal. I have created code-specific fonts to deal with this issue: there are fonts made specifically for code which have code ligatures & the simple l, f, 6, & 9 frozen in, if you like these features but don’t want to mess with OpenType features (or if your code editor doesn’t support that). https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_m.. https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_m.... The issue doesn’t occur in web browsers, as far as I know, as they support proportional type (include mostly-mono families with a few proportional glyphs).
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    macOS Terminal with any of Rec Mono Duotone, Rec Mono Casual, Rec Mono Linear, and Rec Mono SemiCasual installed from `~/git/recursive/fonts/Recursive-Beta_1.053/Recursive_Code`.

mrich 6y ago

Some of the variants look a bit like Comic Sans.

thundernixon 6y ago
A beloved classic. Thanks for trying it out, and thanks for the kind words!

usr1106 6y ago

Some background https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/a-brushstroke-variable-font-taken-to-its-extreme/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/a-brushstroke-variable-font-tak...

Pinus 6y ago

Does fontconfig support this? I know that you can set boolean flags for some fonts (like old-style vs. lining numbers) using the fontfeature property, but what about the "casl" axis, for example?

amai 6y ago

Supports over 200 languages but not Greek and Russian.