I am a very big fan of Monoid, and I would like to keep using it. However, I stopped using it recently because it just doesn't hint properly at all (as far as I saw in fontforge, I saw no hints on any of the Latin alphabetic glyphs). I prefer a larger font of 12px, and thats when I discovered that some of the glyphs are straight up blurry in a lot of cases.
I did try using the autohinter for Monoid specifically in the fontconfig (I am using Linux), but it just didn't look very good. In some cases, the aliasing got even worse with it on. In comparison to Hack, which is a hinted font, I can essentially use it at any size I want and it would always look crisp. With Monoid, I have to use 9px for the glyphs to look nice and clear. I am aware that Monoid was designed for that size, but I just can't deal with how tiny it is.
I'm unsure whether Monoid has, or ever had the design goal for hinting in the first place, but I know how nice and readable the font is, and I think hinting it would improve the visibility of the font at other sizes a lot. I really can't find a suitable alternative to Monoid that is just as unique and readable, which is why I really want this to happen.
Screenshots
Here are some screenshots of the glyphs that look particularly bad to me at 12px and up sizes.
This 12px screenshot shows how the + and - glyphs have no fullbright pixels aligned with the pixel grid. This makes them seem really blurry and out of place while reading with the font. You will also notice how the = glyph does have fullbright pixels, but there is some blur around it.
This is 13px. It's much sharper than 12px, but there is still some blurring around the vertical and horizontal line glyphs where they should be completely aligned with the pixel grid.
Sizes up from here I don't use, as they are too big, but the problem persists for the larger sizes until the font is big enough to not alias.
This is a feature request.
I am a very big fan of Monoid, and I would like to keep using it. However, I stopped using it recently because it just doesn't hint properly at all (as far as I saw in fontforge, I saw no hints on any of the Latin alphabetic glyphs). I prefer a larger font of 12px, and thats when I discovered that some of the glyphs are straight up blurry in a lot of cases.
I did try using the autohinter for Monoid specifically in the fontconfig (I am using Linux), but it just didn't look very good. In some cases, the aliasing got even worse with it on. In comparison to Hack, which is a hinted font, I can essentially use it at any size I want and it would always look crisp. With Monoid, I have to use 9px for the glyphs to look nice and clear. I am aware that Monoid was designed for that size, but I just can't deal with how tiny it is.
I'm unsure whether Monoid has, or ever had the design goal for hinting in the first place, but I know how nice and readable the font is, and I think hinting it would improve the visibility of the font at other sizes a lot. I really can't find a suitable alternative to Monoid that is just as unique and readable, which is why I really want this to happen.
Screenshots
Here are some screenshots of the glyphs that look particularly bad to me at 12px and up sizes.
This 12px screenshot shows how the
+and-glyphs have no fullbright pixels aligned with the pixel grid. This makes them seem really blurry and out of place while reading with the font. You will also notice how the=glyph does have fullbright pixels, but there is some blur around it.This is 13px. It's much sharper than 12px, but there is still some blurring around the vertical and horizontal line glyphs where they should be completely aligned with the pixel grid.
Sizes up from here I don't use, as they are too big, but the problem persists for the larger sizes until the font is big enough to not alias.