Add Serious Shanns font

kaBeech commented 3 weeks ago

Description

This adds Serious Shanns, a fork of Comic Shanns/Comic Mono I made that improves legibility, mainly by disambiguating the 'a'/'o', '1'/'l', and 'y'/'Y' glyphs, and also adds Light and Italic styles

Requirements / Checklist

[x] Read the Contributing Guidelines
[ ] I've discussed this with core contributors already. If not checked, I'm ready to accept this work might be rejected in favor of a different grand plan. Issue number where discussion took place: #xxx
[x] If this contains a font/glyph add its origin as background info below (e.g. URL)
[x] Verified the license of any newly added font, glyph, or glyph set. License is: MIT

What does this Pull Request (PR) do?

Adds the Serious Shanns font

How should this be manually tested?

Ideally, install it for your Terminal/IDE and check it out!

Any background context you can provide?

Font source is Serious Shanns on GitHub

What are the relevant tickets (if any)?

N/A

Screenshots (if appropriate or helpful)

serious_shanns_terminal

serious_shanns_vsc

kaBeech commented 3 weeks ago

@all-contributors please add @kaBeech for code, design

allcontributors[bot] commented 3 weeks ago

@kaBeech

I've put up a pull request to add @kaBeech! :tada:

Finii commented 3 weeks ago

Thanks @kaBeech for suggesting this interesting font!

Some thoughts on the font (superficial review) following. See bottom for comments on the PR.

Why fork and not contribute to some active Comic repo
Charset very limited, no accents, ... 🤔
Just checked Bold, which seems autogenerated and no tweaking afterwards? Tons of self-intersections 😞 [1]
Serious Sans as name is already taken, as you point out, not only Serious Sans Pro - and with a font of similar characteristics [2]
The version number of the font is strange (forgotten to set?) [3]

References

Self intersections everywhere as usual when using for example fontforge's make bolder function. The intersections are tiny but ultimately can cause problems with some font renderers. Missing points at extrema is usually not a bigger problem nowadays.

On the other hand it validates fine in FontBook and Glyphs3.

Reference 1

Reference 2

Reference 3

Regarding the inclusion of Serious Sans to the prepatched Nerd Font set

Although it would "solve" #1393 I am not sure the added weights and styles (Light. Bold, Italic) are hand optimised or just script runs. Furthermore, before Comic Shanns had been included in Nerd Fonts all the free repos of Comic Sans descendants had been checked and Shanns had been chosen as the most active and advanced fork. Going back to a Comic Mono fork (which is a fork of Comic Shanns with just some script run added) feels very strange.

Serious Sans forked Comic Mono, a stale Comic Shanns fork?

I believe this could be a good addition to Comic Shanns Mono instead of a stand alone half-top-of-the-lineage fork. If we add this font to NF users will get some more weights compared to Comic Shanns, but loose all the other good stuff. I literally see Issues pouring in here ;-)

So, while I believe the Italics (to get a full RIBBI set) and more weights (not so much) would be a good addition, this is not really cutting it.

I will add it to the suggested font list in #1095 and close this for now here.

Thank you again!

kaBeech commented 3 weeks ago

Hey @Finii, thanks so much for the review!

Why fork and not contribute to some active Comic repo

To be perfectly honest, this came down to 3 main things:

I wanted to feel free to mangle the font and make it my own without worrying about sending back a bunch of messy commits or accidentally messing up something upstream. Relatedly, I kinda like having other forks as options with glyphs similar to the original Comic Sans as a stylistic choice. I have offered my glyphs to other forks though
At the time I judged the two most widely used monospaced Comic Sans descendants as Comic Shanns (which seemed/seems inactive - FWIW I did comment on this open issue offering my modified glyph to the project when I made Serious Shanns, but didn't open a PR since the repo seems untouched since 2021), and Comic Mono. I forked Comic Mono because I was pretty ignorant about fonts in general and since it seemed by far the most well used (over twice as many stars as the original Comic Shanns and an order of magnitude more than any other forks I saw) and adjusted the metrics in ways I felt unqualified to assess the value of, I figured public opinion would be a better indicator of quality than whatever rookie reasoning I would come up with. I seem to remember doing something that I didn't want to override Thai's work, but now I'm not sure what that was if not the glyph alterations themselves (possibly I didn't want to mess up the metrics they specified). I have now opened a PR for my more generalizable improvements in that repo. I do not know why the fantastic Comic Shanns Mono escaped my attention - I feel like I must have seen this PR while researching, but if I considered it then I likely chose Comic Mono for the reasons listed above.
I was really tickled about the name

Charset very limited, no accents, ... 🤔

Very true. See above for why I chose this fork which lacks the extra characters.

I remember vaguely wondering about this, but I didn't notice any issues when coding in Spanish or Arabic, so I didn't worry too much about it. Looking at my code now I can see that the missing glyphs were substituted in from other fonts 😅

I would like to add more characters in the future but do not have the time to do so currently.

Just checked Bold, which seems autogenerated and no tweaking afterwards? Tons of self-intersections 😞

This is probably correct (obviously correct about the self-intersections). I did autogenerate the Bold/Light/Italic styles, and I remember tweaking the Light and Italic styles, but only for the way they looked visually. It's entirely possible that I didn't tweak Bold at all (you might notice that I didn't mention the Bold style at all in my original PR comment).

Honestly I'm still a font n00b and don't know much about which issues need to be fixed vs what is less necessary to address, especially when similar fonts (such as Comic Shanns Mono) display similar errors on validation. My grug brain didn't understand why a line that overlaps with itself but still makes a valid glyph that looks good would be a problem and didn't know how to fix it, so I let it be. I did just spend 5 minutes learning about this and fixed self-intersections for the regular Bold version locally, so I plan to fix them all soon.

[Edit: Fixed all the self-intersections, points missing at extrema, etc. Also opened a PR to fix similar errors in Comic Shanns Mono]

Serious Sans as name is already taken, as you point out, not only Serious Sans Pro - and with a font of similar characteristics

I was actually confused about this when originally working on this font. I saw the link you mentioned but I didn't find any actual Serious Sans font that wasn't called Serious Sans Pro.

Point taken though - I renamed to Serious Shanns

The version number of the font is strange (forgotten to set?)

Oop, yep, thanks for catching that - fixed!

Regarding the inclusion of Serious Sans to the prepatched Nerd Font set...

All told, I'll look into opening a PR for Comic Shanns Mono. My glyph modifications are the main advantage to me for using Serious Shanns compared with alternatives. I like having the Italic/Light/Bold versions available, but I remember getting them to look good taking way more work than I have time for at the moment and I feel like submitting a PR that adds more styles for the limited charset without touching the other glyphs might be tacky.

As far as I can tell, the only improvements that Comic Shanns Mono has that Serious Shanns does not is the expanded charset (which I plan to incorporate eventually - once that's done it'll likely be simple enough to add the extra styles to Comic Shanns Mono as well), but if there's other good stuff Serious Shanns is missing out on then I'm open to adding it!

Thank you again!

Hey friend, I appreciate all the work you're putting into this project! Nerd Fonts has been extremely helpful for me, both the prepatched font set and the Font Patcher. It's helped me feel empowered to adapt the tools I use for my specific needs. And I really appreciate the quick and thorough PR response! Thank you!

ryanoasis / nerd-fonts