revisit equal and colon spacing

[blobject]

is the vertical spacing in =, :, and ; really satisfactory?

[alexmyczko]

at smaller sizes =I:I;!?ij.:. looks fine to me, the spacing between the dots for : and ; could be a tiny bit less at larger sizes, but not sure. what is more irritating the the interpunction on öäüÄÖÜÿïÏżëė are circles, but not for the other interpunction, where it's more like a square? the dots are also different for .:;?! compared to ij...

on typewriters one used to write

e[backspace]`

or a[backspace]' for è or á, those wouldn't work with a typerwriter with agave. what i find strange is the circle on top, example: å, the degree sign is pressed together, but it should be a perfect circle, like with 30 ° C?

i didn't ever notice but if you write

qp
db

it looks irritating too

[blobject]

Awesome feedback, thanks.

circular diacritics

The discrepancy in circular diacritics is indeed unsettling, but my reasoning was:

• Wanted a boxy and retro style by default, so used rectangular dots in ASCII (i, j, !, ?, :, etc.)
• But kept dots circular for non-ASCII glyphs,
  • partly because some extended glyphs combine diaresis with other diacritics (like "a" + diaresis + acute) and using rectangular dots there would take up too much space.
• The circle-on-top diacritic is flattened because I wanted all glyphs (including extended Latin, etc.) to fit completely within the bounding box. Unfortunate, but seems preferable to overshooting the top boundary.

qp, db

As for "qp" and "db", I'm wondering which sort of "irritation" you mean?:

1. Distance between "q" and "p" (and between "d" and "b") is strange
2. Shape of the bowl is strange when mirrored
3. Heights of the bowls are strange (ie. "q" and "p" are have larger bowls than "d" and "b")

If you mean (3.), that's again a stylistic design and would be hard to change.

typewriter diacritics

Could you refer me to an application that demonstrates this behavior? Looking at fontforge, I do see u0301 (combining acute) has been implemented, but perhaps I need to add something like u02ca (modifier letter acute accent) as well?

edit: also: i, j dots

This could be improved. See https://github.com/blobject/agave/issues/54

[alexmyczko]

Awesome feedback, thanks.

circular diacritics

The discrepancy in circular diacritics is indeed unsettling, but my reasoning was:

• Wanted a boxy and retro style by default, so used rectangular dots in ASCII (i, j, !, ?, :, etc.)
• But kept dots circular for non-ASCII glyphs,

that's fine for small text, but it looks strange if you use sizes > 32...

• partly because some extended glyphs combine diaresis with other diacritics (like "a" + diaresis + acute) and using rectangular dots there would take up too much space.
  • The circle-on-top diacritic is flattened because I wanted all glyphs (including extended Latin, etc.) to fit completely within the bounding box. Unfortunate, but seems preferable to overshooting the top boundary.

I understand, the circl-on-top diactritic just would be different if it there were typewriters with Agave. But I guess it's fine, we're in different time these days.

qp, db

As for "qp" and "db", I'm wondering which sort of "irritation" you mean?:

1. Distance between "q" and "p" (and between "d" and "b") is strange
2. Shape of the bowl is strange when mirrored
3. Heights of the bowls are strange (ie. "q" and "p" are have larger bowls than "d" and "b")

If you mean (3.), that's again a stylistic design and would be hard to change.

maybe not strange, I just noticed when seeing them right next to each other. the hole is of different sizes, but it's probably right, at normal text it's not disturbing.

typewriter diacritics

Could you refer me to an application that demonstrates this behavior? Looking at fontforge, I do see u0301 (combining acute) has been implemented, but perhaps I need to add something like u02ca (modifier letter acute accent) as well?

Manpages and LaTeX has something similar, I think, but not quite the same. AFAIK it only exists for real analog typewriters, correct me if I'm wrong.

edit: also: i, j dots

This could be improved. See #54

good to have the reference here.

[blobject]

I think an important point to make is that I didn't consider use cases where agave would be very big. During the design, I pretty much stuck to small "terminal-standard" sizes. May I ask, in what context you're using agave at > 32? Just out of curiosity.

[alexmyczko]

titles for poster, text or movies. labels. i like how agave looks at large sizes.

so non english umlauts word with an interpunction looks weird due to dot vs square.

[blobject]

I see. Yes, agave may show inconsistencies in those mediums.

I'm willing to consider making all dots circular (https://github.com/blobject/agave/issues/68).

But the other irregularities (size of bowls of dbqp, flattened top-circle) are a more pervasive design change and calls for a variation of the typeface. Like "Agave Display" or something. It could possibly come about in the future but I'm not intent on it at the moment.

As for the typewriter diacritics thing, I think that as long as the typewriter has a key for u0301, your specified behavior will work. But using ASCII's grave and apostrophe to create those accented vowels is outside the scope of agave's design. Perhaps I can look into OpenType functionality or different input methods to learn how that can work (https://github.com/blobject/agave/issues/69).

[alexmyczko]

i've tried to use it as title and display fonts but it just doesn't look good. i'm not sure of easy fixes yet, but maybe you (or someone else reading this) have (has) ideas?