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source-foundry / Hack

A typeface designed for source code
http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/
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Slashed zeroes and other alternate glyphs #200

Closed Ulyssys closed 6 years ago

Ulyssys commented 8 years ago

Personally, I find slashed zeroes easier to read and more aesthetically pleasing than dotted ones. I'm not sure if that's the case in general, but I would like to see a version of this with slashed zeroes.

chrissimpkins commented 7 years ago

v3.0 will include an extremely simple approach to re-design and replace glyphs in the Hack sets with alternates designed by anyone. One of the primary goals of the new UFO only source and build tooling is to make it much easier to modify Hack as a base font design for forks that serve other needs/have other design priorities with open source tools (only).

This would address the issue of a la carte design desires in the fonts. In many/most of these cases, our approach will be to encourage you to create a new fork of Hack and release it yourself as we are better clarifying (for us and you) our design principles for the fonts and intend to follow them in the Hack work.

The process for glyph shape/spacing replacements would look like this:

  1. design a new glyph for an existing glyph in the set with any font editor that supports UFO source
  2. drop the .glif file that maintains the data for that glyph shape (an individual XML text file for each glyph) into the existing Hack source so that it overwrites the existing released .glif file
  3. Build a new set of fonts with our new scripted build approach that will be available as of the v3.0 release that is in progress.

We are working on licensing issues and will provide many more details and likely some tools to support font renaming/versioning (if you intend to continue work and release your fork in versions, including versions that stay current with other changes in Hack releases) so that this approach abides by the license.

Will need to work out an approach to hinting if the replacement glyph is part of the manual hinting sets because our released hints will not apply to the replaced glyph.

I am kicking around the idea of a repository to maintain a collection of alternate glyph shapes for existing glyphs in the sets with contributions to that repository open to anyone who would like to contribute a new glyph design for others. Be interested in your thoughts. If there is an interested potential collaborator out there who might want to tackle this project, we would be interested in helping to support you with it.

Once v3.0 release is available, we will have an actual workflow to support further discussion so that you can provide additional feedback on whether this works for you. Stay tuned.

chrissimpkins commented 6 years ago

Forward slashed zero, backward slashed zero, dotted zero, diamond fill zero are now available as alternates. You can find documentation about the new approach here on the readme:

https://github.com/source-foundry/Hack#customize-your-build-with-alternate-glyph-styles

And the alternate glyph files to build new customized versions of Hack here:

https://github.com/source-foundry/alt-hack

tats-u commented 3 weeks ago

How about the OpenType feature zero? JetBrains Mono supports the slashed zero by it. (It adopts the dotted zero by default)