4 ms·

Include proportional fonts. I know I'm not the only one that uses one. Specially I use Input which has both mono and proportional versions and designed for pro

by Osiris 5y ago

Include proportional fonts. I know I'm not the only one that uses one. Specially I use Input which has both mono and proportional versions and designed for programming.

arnsholt 5y ago
There are dozens of us I tell you, dozens! In my case I saw the light after two years of programming in SmallTalk, where our dev images shipped with Cambria by default.
Stratoscope 5y ago
You are not the only one. I've used proportional fonts exclusively for 10-15 years and will never go back to monospaced. In the past I used Verdana, Georgia, and Trebuchet MS. That last one may seem like an odd choice, but I really like the way it renders on a high-DPI display, with thick readable strokes and easily distinguished "confusable" characters. Trebuchet MS does have some flaws, so I started customizing it into what I call Trebuchet++. What got me started on this was the poor tilde in TMS. I swapped in a better one with FontForge, and then started experimenting with a few other things. One thing that bothered me in particular about proportional fonts is that the underscore character is so much wider than a period. This creates the wrong visual grouping in something like this: name_with_underscores.method_with_underscores() The default spacing causes "underscores.method" to be bound tighter visually than the individual names on each side. So I edited the underscore to add negative spacing while keeping the underscore itself fairly wide. And I added positive spacing around the period. This makes it more clear visually that "name_with_underscores" and "method_with_underscores" are individual names separated by the dot. The next tweak I plan on is adding some positive spacing after a "(" and before a ")" and similarly with [] and {}. It makes me sad that modern coding standards prohibit spaces inside (), [], and {}, even though it makes so much sense logically to have spaces inside them. If I can't fix my company's mandatory code formatter, at least with a proportional font I can adjust it to put just a bit of whitespace there.
- fire 5y ago
  Do you have the font or your modification scripts up on github?
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    I don't have it on GitHub, mostly for worry over Microsoft's copyright on Trebuchet MS. I may get brave and post it anyway! In the meantime, if you drop me an email (address is in my profile) I will be happy to send you a copy of the FontForge project and the compiled .ttf font.

by Osiris 5y ago

Include proportional fonts. I know I'm not the only one that uses one. Specially I use Input which has both mono and proportional versions and designed for programming.

arnsholt 5y ago

There are dozens of us I tell you, dozens! In my case I saw the light after two years of programming in SmallTalk, where our dev images shipped with Cambria by default.

Stratoscope 5y ago

You are not the only one. I've used proportional fonts exclusively for 10-15 years and will never go back to monospaced. In the past I used Verdana, Georgia, and Trebuchet MS. That last one may seem like an odd choice, but I really like the way it renders on a high-DPI display, with thick readable strokes and easily distinguished "confusable" characters. Trebuchet MS does have some flaws, so I started customizing it into what I call Trebuchet++. What got me started on this was the poor tilde in TMS. I swapped in a better one with FontForge, and then started experimenting with a few other things. One thing that bothered me in particular about proportional fonts is that the underscore character is so much wider than a period. This creates the wrong visual grouping in something like this: name_with_underscores.method_with_underscores() The default spacing causes "underscores.method" to be bound tighter visually than the individual names on each side. So I edited the underscore to add negative spacing while keeping the underscore itself fairly wide. And I added positive spacing around the period. This makes it more clear visually that "name_with_underscores" and "method_with_underscores" are individual names separated by the dot. The next tweak I plan on is adding some positive spacing after a "(" and before a ")" and similarly with [] and {}. It makes me sad that modern coding standards prohibit spaces inside (), [], and {}, even though it makes so much sense logically to have spaces inside them. If I can't fix my company's mandatory code formatter, at least with a proportional font I can adjust it to put just a bit of whitespace there.

fire 5y ago
Do you have the font or your modification scripts up on github?
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  I don't have it on GitHub, mostly for worry over Microsoft's copyright on Trebuchet MS. I may get brave and post it anyway! In the meantime, if you drop me an email (address is in my profile) I will be happy to send you a copy of the FontForge project and the compiled .ttf font.