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Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
- olivia-banks 1y agoIt would be nice to see some comparison with other fonts on the GitHub page; the symbols look normal to me, at least. It looks very pretty regardless!
- _piud 1y agothanks 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.
- olivia-banks 1y agoThat'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.
- _piud 1y agoi've now added a table comparing Myna's symbols with a few other popular fonts in the README.md (without naming the fonts explicitly).
- olivia-banks 1y agoThat looks really helpful. Now that I can better see the difference, I'll definitely try it the next time I write Perl or Haskell!
- msephton 1y agoYou could make a PR to add it to https://www.programmingfonts.org https://www.programmingfonts.org so people can become aware and compare
- _piud 1y agothanks for the suggestion. i'd definitely add it once some obvious rendering bugs on Windows are found and resolved.
- fph 1y agoThe Latex example should include at least a math formula.
- kccqzy 1y agoAnd the Haskell example doesn't even include common operators like <$> or <*> or <>. I would've also expected some fancier arrows like =<< or >>>.
- _piud 1y agoagreed. formulae are essential LaTeX. are there any particular glyphs compositions which you'd suggest?
- fph 1y agoThanks! For something more complex, I suggest a moderately complex formula with parentheses and superscripts like $f \in \mathcal{C}^0([a,b])$, an equation delimited by \[...\], and maybe a macro declaration with parameters like \newcommand\halves[1]{\frac{#1}{2}}.
- MarsIronPI 1y agoNot 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.
- floppyd 1y ago>Near-Perfect Alignment: multi-character symbols like ->, >>=, =~, :: align seamlessly The GitHub page has a list with 5 items of what was the focus, this is the first (and I think the most easily noticeable) area
- layer8 1y agoI wonder why only near-perfect.
- _piud 1y agothere 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.
- _piud 1y agodesigner 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.
- Avshalom 1y agoApl, BQN and Oiua would like to talk to you.
- floppyd 1y agoI 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.
- _piud 1y agoi 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).
- layer8 1y agoThe greater/less-than symbols look too high to me as well, also when used as angle brackets like in HTML/XML/C++/Java/TypeScript/….
- adastra22 1y agoA rust example is conspicuously missing from the README.
- _piud 1y agoplease check the illustrations below.
- tacker2000 1y agoAnd JS and PHP, etc… some people have other language priorities and thats fine
- layer8 1y agoI despise this style of curly braces where the arms look more like “S” than like “ʃ”. Don’t go backwards! :)
- _piud 1y agoa 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.
- layer8 1y agoI 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.
- _piud 1y agosurprisingly 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.
- jumaruba 1y agoI'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.
- baobun 1y agoThe 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. Otherwise very attractive font.
- mouse_ 1y agoIt's perfect. Please don't change anything about it.
- evanjrowley 1y agoHow do you feel about 'l' and '1' looking so similar in Myna?
- mouse_ 1y agoDon't care even a 1ittle
- jug 1y agoI 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!
- _piud 1y agoif 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.
- silversides 1y agoIt's gorgeous. Thank you.
- wvbdmp 1y agoThere is already a relatively well-known icon font called Myna UI: https://mynaui.com/icons https://mynaui.com/icons Just a heads-up.
- _piud 1y agothanks for pointing it out. shouldn't be that confusing, i guess.
- jablanyu 1y agoGenuine 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.
- mholt 1y agoI 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%.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoYes, the bigger fonts are easier to read.
- robinhood 1y agoHard 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.
- 1718627440 1y agoAs 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.
- kid64 1y agoAh, to be young.
- 1718627440 1y agoAnd just not having an ultra super-wide extra large screen. Peers of my age also can't stand looking at my screen contents, so maybe it's also because I have bad eye-sight and am used to infer letters from general shapes and context.
- jijojv 1y agoLooks great except for l looking like 1
- _piud 1y agothanks 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- imiric 1y agoI like it, it's very clean. Nice work! 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.
- _piud 1y agothanks 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.
- gorgoiler 1y agoVery nice and condensed. The same reason I switched to Iosevka (Joseph), recently: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka The fun thing with Iosevka is that one stands a reasonable chance of reading the source code (as opposed to just random numbers in SplineSets etc.)
- java-man 1y agoMy favorite monospaced font, on Windows and Mac.
- typpilol 1y agoI switched to codenewroman mono with a nerd font. Makes my terminal look amazing as well. Especially since I've been working on a color scripts compilation that relies heavily on font being accurate
- gdwatson 1y agoBeside 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.
- andai 1y agoIosevka is great. I use a custom version Iosevka Orw from here https://github.com/s0la/orw/tree/master/.fonts https://github.com/s0la/orw/tree/master/.fonts It's about halfway between standard Iosevka and a typical monospace font in terms of narrowness. I find it ideal.
- electroly 1y agoThank 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.
- _piud 1y agoIosevka 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).
- thetwentyone 1y agoAlso see the JuliaMono typeface: https://juliamono.netlify.app https://juliamono.netlify.app It was designed to be a comprehensive monocode typeface to support Julia's full Unicode support.
- _piud 1y agothanks 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.
- eviks 1y agoThanks 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...)
- kstrauser 1y agoThis is very pretty, but... 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.
- _piud 1y agoi 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.
- theultdev 1y agoLooks beautiful! Have you done any focus on Typescript by chance? I will test it out and report any abnormalities I see!
- _piud 1y agothanks! 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.
- tmtvl 1y agoLooks pretty good, but I often need to read Japanese characters so I'm gonna stick to IBM Plex, which has both Monospace and CJK variants.
- justsomehnguy 1y ago> IBM Plex I found what while it's not the best for me - it is suprisingly good for a PowerPoint-like presentations, #specially the condensced vars.
- msephton 1y agoIBM 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.
- Pet_Ant 1y agoI 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.
- gmueckl 1y agoNot 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 :).
- _piud 1y agoit 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.
- vanderZwan 1y agoBecause there are programming languages where "->" and "=>" have semantic meaning, but the unicode arrows don't.
- sampo 1y ago> have macros for your editors that allow you to convert the "->" into an actual arrow. Or, as suggested here, use language macros: #define → -> https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/2023/01/5485.php https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/2023/01/5485.php
- teo_zero 1y agoThis 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.
- 1y ago
- o11c 1y agoThis, 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.
- munchler 1y agoYour 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?
- o11c 1y ago> Are there any programming languages that use vertical arrows? Do they appear on one line or two? Befunge (1993; many later languages were inspired by it) uses just the ASCII arrowheads. The arrow tail is more likely to exist in doc comments.
- leephillips 1y agoAPL
- lynguist 1y agoI wouldn’t program with it but I find it extremely aesthetic.
- dannyfritz07 1y agoVery similar to Intel One Mono which is a font I love to use. - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/company-overview/one-monospace-font.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/company-overview/one...
- superfamicom 1y agoReminds me of the beautiful M+ fonts. https://mplusfonts.github.io/ https://mplusfonts.github.io/
- JSR_FDED 1y agoMy programming font in Vim for the last 10 years!
- daneel_w 1y agoAfter testing it for an hour I concluded that for me, Cascadia Code is a lot more legible.
- _piud 1y agothanks for testing it. if i can suggest, a wider space between letter helps, for me at least.
- kazinator 1y ago> Do you ever feel like your font treats symbols as second-class glyphs? No because this problem has been solved by other font designers working with pretty much exactly the same requirements.
- _piud 1y agothanks for the feedback. if that be the case, i'm afraid Myna might not be of much use to you.
- kazinator 1y agoThat's not the case. Rather, you don't provide reasons to motivate people to switch to your font and stick with it. You have mainly two kinds of users: - those who have always stuck with whatever font came up by default in their text editor or terminal emulator. - those who have gone through a phase of experimenting and tried a good bunch of fonts, then settled. When you motivate the former group to experiment, they will tend to go into the second group: once they get into the workflow of installing fonts, they won't just stop at the one that was suggested to them first. The second group is harder to motivate to try new fonts; they will do it if there is some compelling reason they can understand /before/ installing. You don't explain how your font stands out above the competition. Or, maybe the personal angle: I tried these fifteen different fonts and still had to make one because X, Y, Z, so here it is.
- _piud 1y agoi thought the illustrations were enough to decide if one likes the font. now i have also added a comparison table of Myna with many popular monospace fonts (if that could help gauge the utility). i understand that there would be many many folks who would find this font ugly and unusable. it is largely a matter of personal preference.
- kazinator 1y agoDon't misunderstand; the examples do look great. > find this font ugly and unusable Not even remotely the case; they would have to get their heads examined.
- teo_zero 1y agoBeautiful. 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.
- _piud 1y agothanks 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.
- NooneAtAll3 1y agoMy gripe with lots of fonts have been insistence on making 1-l-I confusable the problem there isn't only in making characters distinct - but it's about not confusing one for another "in a vacuum", by itself this font succeeded in making `I` unique - but `l` still looks like "one" I wish people copied discord's font in this instance - remove bottom serifs altogether and replace with a slanted end
- binary132 1y agoI 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. :)
- iambvk 1y agoMy 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
- _piud 1y agoUbuntu Mono is great. many glyphs in Myna are directly borrowed from Ubuntu Mono, just more condensed and better aligned.
- globular-toast 1y agoI'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".
- _piud 1y agoyes, 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.
- nielsbot 1y agoMeta, 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. Input Sans is great: https://input.djr.com https://input.djr.com
- eviks 1y agoGreat, but it unfortunately breaks vertical alignment with elastic tabstops solution still missing everywhere https://nick-gravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ https://nick-gravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
- nielsbot 1y agoIf you use spaces for vertical alignment, then yes things don't vertically align. But I've sacrificed vertical alignment for a more human-friendly code appearance :)
- eviks 1y ago> 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
- _piud 1y agoi 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.
- eviks 1y agowell, 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...
- _piud 1y agoi 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.
- kronicum2025 1y agoIs 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?
- rbanffy 1y agoI love when people make their own fonts (I make one myself), but I wish they had more unique personalities. These days it’s hard to tell one programming font from another.
- stOneskull 1y agoi'd like one with more extreme braces. a lot of the time, my old eyes find it hard to tell them apart from parentheses. i like OP's font but braces are looking like brackets now.
- rbanffy 1y agoMy eyes miss the 14” 80x25 green phosphor of the IBM 3278.
- piekvorst 1y agoI don’t get why should programming fonts be necessarily monospaced.
- abdulhaq 1y agoThat's a fair question, for one thing white space is often important and sometimes very important, so we need spacing to be very clear. Also it can be useful to have vertical alignment to indicate a pattern in the code or data.
- PaulHoule 1y agoIt’s got some of the feel of a 3270 font while still being really different.
- bityard 1y agoI think one thing you are running into here in the HN comments is that ligatures as they relate to source code editing can be somewhat controversial among developers who are especially vocal about their preferences. Some people believe that ligatures make source code more readable. Even, perhaps, beautiful or "comfy." Others feel that past a certain point, programming font choice doesn't really matter much and that too much time spent sharpening the saw means you never get around to cutting the wood. Or that hiding two physical symbols behind a single logical one for the sake of aesthetics is somewhere between pointless and dishonest. Still others are of the opinion that we wouldn't need ligatures at all if programming languages understood Unicode. The other problem of course being that most of us don't have Unicode keyboards. Your project seems to have somehow managed to upset all three camps and for that, I salute you and have starred your project on GitHub.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Aurornis 1y ago> I think one thing you are running into here in the HN comments is that ligatures as they relate to source code editing can be somewhat controversial among developers who are especially vocal about their preferences It’s easy to toggle ligatures on or off in the common editors. A lot of fonts have them, but they’re opt-in. Nobody gets alienated.
- codazoda 1y agoLooks pretty nice. I could download and try it but one character I find missing, from the sample, is emdash. I wrote a lot of markdown and many programming typefaces get emdash wrong (it’s hard to tell from a regular dash). Looks like I’ll have to install this to see if it’s the case here. BTW, I find the screenshots for this font quite a bit more useful in evaluating it than any of the other fonts referenced in the HN comments here. These help you decide at a glance.
- _piud 1y agothanks for the feedback. i think the em-dash is not very different in case of this font too. i made the (en-)dash so wide that there was no way to disambiguate within fixed-width constraints. i don't use em-dash at all, so there was no need to disambiguate too. if you want to use it but em-dash is the only deal-breaker, please try it once and raise a feature request. i'd see what we can change to make it work.
- gjm11 1y agoYou're absolutely correct! The em-dash isn't just another character—it's the foundation of good writing style. Would you like me to show you some examples of how important em-dashes are for good writing? (Sorry.)
- abdulhaq 1y agolol
- fsckboy 1y ago>Myna tries to emulate the smooth look of ligatures but also retains the simplicity of ASCII this sentence makes no sense, ASCII is something like a code page and ligatures are something like glyphs
- peter_d_sherman 1y agoObservation: Most programming languages evolved from the limited selection of ASCII printable characters from the keys of early ASCII keyboards (which evolved from earlier typewriters and teletype machines)... But these days we have Unicode -- a huge amount of potential symbols (and combinations of symbols!) that could be used in new programming languages (i.e., asterisk: '*', long used for multiplication could (finally!) be replaced with a true multiplication symbol: 'x' -- if an extended symbol space were used by the language... Symbols could visually represent such things as loops, conditionals, variable declarations, etc., etc. Pointers and pointer dereferencing (if the language supported it) -- could have their own symbols... Would that be a good idea? Well, if backwards ASCII compatibility is desired to run on old computers for whatever reason (in a future time when we need to revert back to older/simpler/more predictable systems because the AI's are out of control?) then maybe not... But if we wanted graphical or quasi-graphical symbols to represent programming constructs more visually -- then maybe the idea has some merit... Maybe a conversion program could be written that would convert between the new symbol set and ASCII, and maybe the programming language would be created to recognize both constructs... And yes, I know that there is the Scratch programming language -- but I'm not talking about quite that visual! :-) The language I envision would still be physically typed on a keyboard, as most are today... Anyway, great looking typeface!
- edem 1y agodoes this support ligatures? or is it designed in a way that you dont need them?