Comment by armadillu

3 years ago

I can only really judge a font when its loaded in my system, running in my setup. I wish font makers targeting developers would release trial fonts (with some essential chars missing or similar), so that we could test them properly before paying.

I am always looking for a better font, and this one looks like it may be an improvement over my current one.

My thoughts exactly. Berkeley Mono looks great on the website and in the PDF data sheet, but the real test is how does it look in my terminal and editor, especially when compared side-by-side with my current preferred font (Pragmata Pro; also commercial but well worth it!)

  • I purchased Berkeley Mono to give it a shot. While I found it visually appealing, it still cannot compete in the terminal against Pragmata Pro due to how narrow Pragmata Pro is. I can fit so much more on my screen yet still have it be clean and legible with Pragmata Pro.

    • We've been working on a condensed version, it has been almost complete (all 440+ glyphs) since last year but it has a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out. This will also enable a Width ('wdth') axis on variable fonts so if your editor supports, can smoothly go from Regular ---> Condensed ---> Compressed versions.

      There is also a complete Extended version but it has many issues, we won't be releasing that anytime soon.

Thanks and good feedback, beta testing was done in a similar way - font cut with a few missing glyphs and was limited to ASCII-basic set. I'll see if I can extend this more generally.

  • One idea to consider... offer the font but with the vowels jumbled around and the digits jumbled around. I can see everything I need. But would need to buy it if I really want to use it.

  • Yes please - in my case because fonts look different on Windows and Mac (and Linux?) and I've been caught a few times after buying fonts that looked great only to discover all screenshots were from Macs and on Windows it was nothing like it.