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larsenwork / monoid

Customisable coding font with alternates, ligatures and contextual positioning. Crazy crisp at 12px/9pt. http://larsenwork.com/monoid/
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Improve rendering without antialiasing #5

Closed zevv closed 9 years ago

zevv commented 9 years ago

Hi,

I've been running my own custom font for the last ten years, but I guess your font might make for a nice alternative.

I'm not fan of antialiasing for programming fonts though, but I can't get Mono16 to render properly on sizes other then 16px. Am I doing something wrong, or does your font not (yet?) include rendering hints for other pixel sizes?

Thanks,

larsenwork commented 9 years ago

It is autohinted so it should work at all sizes but it's drawn over a 16pt grid so that bitmap-looking sharpness is only at 16.

But it's difficult for me to determine if it's a bug without a screenshot :)

zevv commented 9 years ago

Using xterm, settign font size and disabling antialiasing:

xterm -fa 'Mono16:pixelsize=24:style=Normal:antialias=false'

Results for 14, 16 and 24:

http://zevv.nl/div/14.jpg http://zevv.nl/div/16.jpg http://zevv.nl/div/24.jpg

larsenwork commented 9 years ago

Yep, as expected - the autohint doesn't really work without antialiasing - the reason it looks good enough at 16 pt is because it's drawn over a 16pt grid.

I only started drawing font's <½ year ago as a hobby so I'm not that experienced but achieving pixel perfect look without antialiasing at all font sizes sounds like a lot of work and not something I will look into but if you or someone else seeing this feels like it then by al means give it a go ;)

zevv commented 9 years ago

Yep, as expected - the autohint doesn't really work without antialiasing - the reason it looks good enough at 16 pt is because it's drawn over a 16pt grid.

I only started drawing font's <½ year ago as a hobby so I'm not that experienced but achieving pixel perfect look without antialiasing at all font sizes sounds like a lot of work and not something I will look into but if you or someone else seeing this feels like it then by al means give it a go ;)

I can't blame you, making fonts is a tedious job, and it's hard to figure out all the technical details and font-lingo to get things to work right on various platforms. I've been running my own font for a decade or so, but it's a bitmap font instead of truetype:

http://zevv.nl/play/code/zevv-peep/

I was hoping to find a replacement TTF that would work properly on more platforms one day, and yours comes quite close to that.

It's just a tad to big to my liking. With modern computer screens getting wider and wider, vertical screen space is becoming a scarse resource. Having 16 px lines instead of the 14 px I'm used to is like going from a 1280 to a 1050 lines display; i'm losing a lot lines in the process!

I'll try to fiddle with the various geometry parameters in a font editor to see if I can get Mono16 to squeeze into my requirements, thanks for the support so far.

:wq ^X^Cy^K^X^C^C^C^C

larsenwork commented 9 years ago

That font looks really nice! When the build script that another guy is working on is done it will probably support adjusting line hight too ;) And I actually think I'll make some changes to mono16 inspired by your font to make it a bit less tall...

larsenwork commented 9 years ago

screen shot 2015-04-07 at 10 45 18

larsenwork commented 9 years ago

screen shot 2015-04-07 at 13 10 40

zevv commented 9 years ago

Looks a bit more compact, you reduced the line spacing here?

screen shot 2015-04-07 at 13 10 40

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/andreaslarsen/mono16/issues/5#issuecomment-90508726

:wq ^X^Cy^K^X^C^C^C^C

larsenwork commented 9 years ago

I'm using brackets where you set the line height in css but I've reduced the length of the ascenders and descenders to allow for smaller line heights without the text overlapping

larsenwork commented 9 years ago

I'm not sure this issue is something I'll look into - if/when someone else does please reopen :+1: