Comment by AJRF
2 years ago
I paid for this font. I can't believe it, but I just kept coming back to the webpage every week thinking "Aww dang its nice, but no way would I ever pay $75 for a font for personal use".
But I kept coming back. Again and again, just looking through their page. I tried the trial. I eventually caved. A weird moment for me, but I bloody love this font and I frequently notice how nice it is in all my IDEs.
I sound like a shill, sorry.
The website is fantastic. Font looks great and samples are an eye candy, so tried it just now.
Windows, 1920 x 1200 @ 96 dpi, Visual Studio, light-on-dark theme. I like 'em small to fit more on the screen and at 8px this font looks janky. It is blurry with uneven thickness and requires an eye strain to read. It doesn't seem to be hinted at all even though it is a TTF version.
Here's Berkley Mono on the left and Mensch on the right - https://i.imgur.com/CM27hVV.png
At 9px characters somehow retain their width but just get taller.
At 10px it starts looking better, but glyphs still look kinda feeble and aren't terribly pleasant to look at.
Just 2c. The character design is very nice still.
Mensch presumably is this font: https://robey.lag.net/2010/06/21/mensch-font.html
I’ll have to try it. I’m still using Lucida Console because most newer fonts lack hinting for smaller sizes.
Yes, that's the one. It's overall fantastic.
As far as 8px fonts go, there's also Dina, which is very similar, but with a pixelated look even though it's a TTF.
https://github.com/zshoals/Dina-Font-TTF-Remastered
I have the same issue. Things look blurry at any font size below 12pt, which affects pretty much all of my use cases since I live in the terminal, sized at 10pt. This is especially bad with the bold version of the font.
I really like the look of the font, but the hinting needs to be fixed before I'd purchase it. It's currently unusable for me.
IDK; it might as well be Windows.
I'm used to use DejaVu Sans Mono. Under X (Linux) it works beautifully and stays relatively readable down to 7pt; I usually set it to 11pt.
Under Windows 10, on the same screen with same DPI, I could not make it look reasonably in native programs like Notepad++; it stays blurry up until ridiculously large sizes. Emacs, which of course brings its own rendering to Windows, is able to render it somehow more crisply.
Conversely, Consolas looks wonderful under Windows, crisp and sharp. I could not make it render equally well under Linux.
And macOS is another land; it refuses to make fonts crisp if matching the pixel grid would change their shape even slightly. The only recourse is retina displays.
YMMV.
This is one of the reasons why I'm hoping to sometime this year upgrade my main monitor to something with high pixel density that is practical to run with integer scaling: super crisp text with any size and font. Text doesn't look terrible on my current 27" 2560x1440 monitor with a font that's designed for it, but it's a far cry from the same text on my MBP screen.
I’m waiting for a 27" 4K monitor with better-than-IPS contrast (i.e. VA or OLED) to use at 200% DPI, to replace a 1920x1200. With WQHD (2560x1440) I have the problem that 1-pixel stems are too thin for my eyes, 2-pixel stems are too big (font gets too large relative to screen size), and everything in between is blurry.
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so am i right to assume the font does not have embedded bitmap for small pixel sizes? That would be a bummer.
1920x1200? 96 DPI?! Both those fonts look like absolute garbage, and how could they not? Only, in my opinion, Berkeley Mono actually looks more passable of the two. Something about the one on the right makes it look ethereal. Like it's behind the display. But don't let that detract from the fact that looking at code at 96 dpi is absolute garbage. Perhaps you're broke, in which case I retract my stupid comment. But if not: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/
It’s only in the last decade that font designers stoped to care about low-dpi screens. Same for UI designers. It all started when those designers started to work on Retina screens.
It would be ok if the vast majority of screens were high dpi. But they are not. It’s not a question of being broke or not.
Affordable high-dpi screens are pretty much a recent thing. It keeps being rare (and expensive) on every laptop that isn’t a Mac.
Most companies bought hundreds of 1920*1080 screens in the last decade and they have no real incentive to throw them out of the window neither they feel the need to go 4K even when they buy new screens.
Good hi-dpi+multiscreen support on windows is no more recent than Windows 10 1703. On Linux it’s still garbage.
Millions of people are stuck working with low-dpi screens. It’s not like you have that much power over your employer to ask for a better screen without him changing the whole fleet because all your coworkers now wants one.
So I agree with you. In an ideal world, low-dpi should be something from the past. But it isn’t. And in our real world, the real shame is that designers (including font designers) stopped caring for the vast majority of people who don’t use a hi-dpi screen to work.
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Personally, I've stuck with free fonts most of the time. For programming, currently I tend to use:
Liberation Mono: from the very same package of fonts that are included in LibreOffice, I find it to be surprisingly readable and easy on the eyes for most kinds of code or monospaced text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
PT Mono: while initially I really liked PT Sans and PT Serif separately (they're currently the fonts for my homepage/blog), their monospaced offering is also quite nice; albeit when there's some light colored text (e.g. comments) at the smaller font sizes, the full stop character can become a bit harder to see. Here's more information about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Fonts
Here's a quick comparison, comparing the two fonts against Consolas and JetBrains Mono (with some Java code, taken from a throwaway project): https://imgur.com/a/mr9afqT
Personally, out of all of them Liberation Mono feels like the most readable, whereas PT Mono just appeals to me stylistically on some level. However, paid fonts, like the linked one are also great - whatever feels more pleasant to stare at for a large number of hours per day!
PT Mono was my goto for a long time. For the past few years I've been running Dank Mono[0].
The Liberation font don't look bad but their wideness as well as that of other common FOSS fonts like the Vera/Bitstream fonts has always bugged me for some reason. Whenever I do a fresh Linux install and the desktop is configured to use one of those I have to download and install Inter UI or Ubuntu Sans as the UI font for it to not bug me.
[0]: https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono [1]: https://rsms.me/inter/ [2]: https://design.ubuntu.com/font
> The Liberation font don't look bad but their wideness as well as that of other common FOSS fonts like the Vera/Bitstream fonts has always bugged me for some reason.
Ohh, that's a fair point. I guess it's very obvious in the comparison, when you look at something like Consolas and any of the others.
I've heard good things about Iosevka, when you care a lot about horizontal compactness: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
Thanks for posting that comparison. I really wanted to like Liberation Mono, as I'm a big fan of the whole LibreOffice project in general, but I find that, when compared side by side, I actually prefer Jetbrains Mono over the other three.
Same here, I try out a lot of monospace fonts as they come along. But Liberation Mono just scratches all my itches so well.
I do however enjoy setting comments using fonts that aren't monospaced (which I begrudgingly acknowledge Comic Sans is actually decent for).
At some point though the old typographers adage of "people read best, what they read most" must impact our preferences.
Ive been using proportional fonts for coding for more than a decade now, and I can’t go back to mono space. I just wish there was a proportional programming font with ligatures, but I’m ok doing without if it means going monospace.
Try Averia for the comments.
In fact I would've loved to try a mono version of it if it were avaiable.
http://iotic.com/averia/
I had a very similar experience with Pragmata Pro. I kept coming back to the page and eventually just forked out the money for it. I adore that font and I've been using it for going on 8 years.
This is not a this font vs. that font comment - it's about spending money on a font and how a lot of people find that a weird thing. For me, I came to the realization that it's a thing I literally spend hours every day looking at, so if spending a small amount of cash would improve that experience then why would I not do it?
Me too - then Iosevka came along...
Does Iosevka have hand-designed bitmaps for a bunch of common font sizes so text looks great even on low-DPI displays?
https://fsd.it/wp-content/uploads/PragmataPro_bitmaps.gif
To me, this is one of the best parts of Pragmata Pro (which I also eventually bought and has been my daily driver for years, although I do use Berkeley Mono for presentations and screenshots...)
I've settled on this one. Fits a lot of characters on the line while remaining legible, which turns out to be very useful.
I just did the exact same thing. I've been thinking about it since it was first on Show HN a year ago. And I kept putting it off. Today they got me.
And this isn't even the first monospaced font I've spent money on that I know I will probably not always use. I own Operator. Dank. Mono Lisa.
But the design and the attention to detail with downloading as regards to the stylistic set defaults (for applications that don't follow/adhere/support stylistic sets, which is something I could write a whole rant on) makes me very happy to support this team.
Dank mono annoys me except in one spot - conference presentation slides (where it still annoys me, but I can see it being useful). The italics as cursive is annoying - especially with the 's' that shows up in too many places.
However, the difficulty of distinguishing italics from regular on a presentation I can mostly forgive it since I can now recognize the italics and that hint to whatever it is trying to show much more easily than if I was trying to figure out a color (I'm not color blind but that is an accessibility issue) or the 'is that tilted enough?'
(and looking for a bit of nostalgia, https://dank.sh/ now redirects to https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono and while its done, it can be purchased again!)
I had the same journey with Codelia[1]. Berkeley looks great, though!
[1] https://tosche.net/fonts/codelia
oh man, thats beautiful. but hefty price tag!
$75 seems worth it for a lifetime of personal use/enjoyment.
I did the same, and have zero regrets. I've tried so many fonts over the last 15 years, but this one just works for me.
I also paid for it, my first font I paid for just for aesthetics and personal enjoyment. I don't regret it. I use it anywhere and everywhere I can!