[HN Gopher] Mona Sans and Hubot Sans
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Mona Sans and Hubot Sans
Author : waldekm
Score : 78 points
Date : 2022-12-02 17:59 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.blog)
| jccalhoun wrote:
| In my opinion, any font that makes it hard to distinguish between
| I and l is a failure.
| yunohn wrote:
| Why is everyone talking about these as /coding/ fonts? They
| clearly don't have that positioning or intent:
|
| > Mona Sans ... work as our primary font across mediums ... You
| can see it in use on our more marketing-oriented pages on GitHub.
|
| > Hubot Sans ... is our secondary brand font at GitHub ... you
| can see it in use in the ReadME Project, and on the GitHub
| Universe site.
| mariusmg wrote:
| Everyone and their dog are making fonts these days. Not
| complaining about high quality free fonts, just find it a bit
| strange...
| culi wrote:
| Variable fonts, color fonts, etc. There's a lot happening
|
| https://v-fonts.com/
|
| I'll still only stick to websafe fonts for actual websites but
| I'm excited to see what the future holds. Also because I hate
| Arial
| psygn89 wrote:
| There's a lot you can do with variable fonts. I remember
| stumbling upon https://variicon.netlify.app/index.html a year
| or two ago, although there's disdain for using icons as a
| font it was eye opening for me with what you could do.
| layer8 wrote:
| And none of them seem to have good hinting for low-DPI use.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Maybe I'm weird, but I loathe body text in sans-serif fonts. They
| aren't all equally bad, but ilI are often confusing. Just the
| other day I was reading something somewhere with a name that
| ended in "ill" and I had to copy-paste somewhere else to tell it
| wasn't just a roman-numeral 3 smushed on the end.
|
| And of course sentences that start with "Ill" just break my flow
| of reading.
| flobosg wrote:
| There's an earlier font named Mona:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_(font)
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's too grotesk. I think Apple accidentally set everyone off on
| the "search for the perfect sans font" but neither this nor the
| new Discord font is anywhere near as nice as San Francisco.
|
| If you want a clean sans font, I'd highly recommend Plex sans:
| https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans
|
| Very straightforward, highly legible at all weights, normal-
| human-being-style kerning and nicely tucked edges. If you're
| looking for something more flavorful than Roboto, use this or
| Inter. Please don't design your own eye-melting garbage, for my
| sake.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Plex Sans is too angular for me, the "f", "g" and "t" for
| example. I like Grotesk style sans serif fonts personally,
| there still isn't an amazing one out there.
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| Nice call on the Plex Sans, for at least one major reason: The
| capital "i" has a crossbar.
|
| Any font that doesn't have a proper capital "i" (meaning one
| WITH CROSSBARS) should be rejected, especially for any kind of
| technical use. If you can't tell the difference between a
| lower-case L and a 1, the font is useless. And really the same
| goes for a capital O or zero.
| nagyf wrote:
| Plex's capital "O" and it's 0 (zero) is pretty much
| indistinguishable.
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _If you 're looking for something more flavorful than Roboto,
| use this or Inter._
|
| Speaking of which, Inter 4.0 is in beta and looking really
| good. Now's a great time for type aficionados to try it out and
| offer feedback! https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Are there any differences between 3 and 4? I didn't see any
| screenshots anywhere.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| > Please don't design your own eye-melting garbage, for my
| sake.
|
| I think there is still so much room to experiment with Grotesk
| typefaces. Perhaps the frustration is caused by everygoing
| going Druk in Magazine design and custom Corporate typography
| that's just incredibly...corporate. Every other grotesk fork of
| Akzidenz tends to follow Helvetica's path and the New York
| aesthetic. Public apathy is understandable.
|
| The other fork of Akzidenz is Univers and its derivates; they
| are wonderful, especially for technical communication. I can't
| pinpoint why, perhaps it is nostalgia, but perhaps it is its
| formality and the way it is kerned by Adrian. Genius. I wrote
| about it on HN a few years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19621544
|
| There are only a couple of decent typefaces that are
| alternatives to Univers. Unica77 and Swiss 721, both again
| trying to bring Helvetica into the Univers business.
|
| So, I've taken up the task of propelling Univers forward. I
| hope it won't melt your eyes.
| smcl wrote:
| I hate to admit it since IBM are like the OG "big bad company"
| but their Open Source programming fonts are the ones I like the
| best out of those that came out recently (Source Code Pro,
| Cascadia, JetBrains Mono, Mononoki, Go Mono, etc - see
| https://www.programmingfonts.org)
| lcnmrn wrote:
| Not as nice as Route 159: https://dotcolon.net/font/route159/
| loudandskittish wrote:
| ...I can't deal with that f
| dandellion wrote:
| I wish they introduced GitHub Sans Downtime instead of this.
| There's already plenty of high quality free fonts to choose from.
| inoffensivename wrote:
| Hah, good one! I personally use Ubuntu Mono as my programming
| font, I've yet to find any font I prefer to spend hours a day
| staring at.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| I used Ubuntu Mono for awhile, but I'm now a fan of both
| Cascadia Code/Mono (depending on if you want ligatures) and
| SF Mono, although the latter is a pain to install on non-
| macOS systems because you have to unpack the .dmg file and
| the underlying .pkg files.
| hrbf wrote:
| May I recommend Berkeley Mono
| (https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono/). It's
| a paid font but well worth it, given you're spending hours
| every day looking at it. I have found it to be excellent for
| the shell and editors.
| netr0ute wrote:
| I really like that font, but that price ($75) is really
| untenable for me. Is there any alternative?
| ashton314 wrote:
| Input Mono [1] is beautiful, and kinda looks like
| Berkeley Mono. It too is paid for commercial use, but
| it's free for personal.
|
| I used Input for a very long time until I made my own
| blend of Iosevka [2] that looks very similar--just with
| more exotic symbols.
|
| [1]: https://input.djr.com/ [2]:
| https://sr.ht/~ashton314/iosevka-output/
| culi wrote:
| Yeah that one mono font quiz[0] always ends up recommending
| it to me
|
| [0] https://www.codingfont.com/
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| Very handy utility! My foray steers me to Source Code Pro.
| stevefolta wrote:
| Is Hubot-Sans.ttf working in XWindows for anyone? Mona-Sans.ttf
| is fine for me, but not Hubot.
| stevefolta wrote:
| Never mind. It's that hyphen in its name. Mona Sans is called
| "Mona Sans", but Hubot Sans is called "Hubot-Sans". And
| FontConfig requires that the hyphen be quoted, eg.:
| "Hubot\\-Sans-16.5:weight=60".
| gnabgib wrote:
| This was discussed 22 days ago(119pts, 48 comments)[0], slightly
| different content[1] but not by much. It seems a shame this blog
| post didn't address samueloph's point[2] (lower L and upper i are
| ambiguous)
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33553659 [1]:
| https://github.com/mona-sans [2]:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554633
| crazygringo wrote:
| For a body text font, there's no problem with lower L and upper
| i being ambiguous. When you're reading paragraphs of text,
| there's virtually always enough context that it's a non-issue.
|
| Now, if you're displaying code or a password or similar that
| needs to be retyped, then yes they need to be differentiated,
| but that's not what a font like this is meant for -- that's
| what monospaced code fonts are for.
|
| But no differentiation is needed for a proportional sans-serif
| font intended for regular written language. An uppercase i with
| crossbars above and below would be jarringly ugly for many
| sans-serif fonts, and similarly a hook at the top of a
| lowercase L may not fit the font's personality at all,
| depending on how other letterforms are designed. (And trying to
| differentiate the lowercase L with something more subtle, by
| making it a smidgen taller or angling the top, usually might as
| well be invisible at body text size.)
| Beltalowda wrote:
| It still comes up occasionally; just yesterday a customer was
| talking about the clID field of an XML file in an email, and
| it's kind of hard to see. For years I thought Douglas McIlroy
| was named "Mcllroy" (with two lower L's) and I wasn't quite
| sure how you should pronounce that, until I heard his name
| pronounced somewhere; "ohh, it's a capital i!"
|
| Given how easy it is to prevent this kind of confusion, I
| don't really understand why you _wouldn 't_ want to at least
| provide a subtle hint and make either the I or l stand about
| just a little bit.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| It's even worse when one assumes "I" are capital-i's to
| assuming they are lower-case ells and back.
|
| "Ill-advised llama farm was Ian's folly."
| noizejoy wrote:
| I'm still very happy to see more high quality and free variable
| fonts. They save a few lines of code and a bit of network egress
| when self hosting fonts (for better privacy).
| piskerpan wrote:
| I thought variable width fonts were pretty heavy? I don't think
| you actually save data over loading two separate weights. The
| savings come in later (3+ weights)
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(page generated 2022-12-02 23:01 UTC)