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Has anyone ever made a monospace font with dynamic kerning? Which is a silly thing I never thought of until I read the above comment. This sounds nonsensical at
by somat 3mo ago
Has anyone ever made a monospace font with dynamic kerning? Which is a silly thing I never thought of until I read the above comment. This sounds nonsensical at first glance(and it may be) but hear me out.
We use monospace fonts for a reason, they stack in a grid nicely. But within the confines of that grid there is room to shift a character left or right a bit which may lead to a nicer to read monospace. (it is equally likely to lead to a hideous mess, every time a letter would shift left it would leave a larger space right)
- roblabla 3mo agoMonaspace has a feature called "texture healing" that does something similar: it allows bigger letters to "steal" space from adjascent smaller letters, to make it easier to read. The result is that the letters are still in a grid, while still allowing for bigger letters to "breathe". https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/blob/main/docs/Texture%20Healing.md https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/blob/main/docs/Textu... It's the main reason I use monaspace as a font.
- gavinray 3mo agoWhat a brilliant idea, neat. Thanks for the link.
- bityard 3mo agoI'm open to trying it, but my gosh, having one 'w' offset slightly by a few pixels from the one right above it feels like it would drive me bonkers eventually. And: doesn't this result in text that "jumps around" as you type?
- stavros 3mo agoOnly at most one letter jumps around, the previous letter you typed.
- Lalabadie 3mo agoiA Writer has Mono, Duo and Quattro fonts, with the latter two being almost monospaced. They concede some size variations for specific characters (Duo has 150% width characters, Quattro also uses 50% and 75% for narrow characters). It's a fun subtle adaptation to keep close to the typewriter-like experience of the app. https://ia.net/topics/a-typographic-christmas https://ia.net/topics/a-typographic-christmas
- alfirous 3mo agoDuo is perfect middle ground between monospace and proportional sans, in my opinion at least. There's also Trispace[1]. https://etceteratype.co/pages/trispace https://etceteratype.co/pages/trispace
- kccqzy 3mo agoShifting a letter left or right a bit can break the grid. What if the user writes the text that keeps triggering left shifts? A better solution is to use ligatures, so that specific character combinations look better while the ligature can maintain the overall width correctly.