Not trying to be negative, just confused: I don't really see how this font is "designed for symbol-heavy languages". The symbols look normal to me. Maybe the letters are a little more spaced? I'd love to be enlightened.
The GitHub page has a list with 5 items of what was the focus, this is the first (and I think the most easily noticeable) area
layer8•58m ago
I wonder why only near-perfect.
sayyadirfanali•46m ago
there are bounds to be many many operators and glyph combinations where things don't match properly. an example is the variable declaration and initialisation symbol in Go which combines colon and equal sign. if you use Myna and come across any such examples, please raise a feature request. i only focused on glyphs for languages i use personally. but if there is interest i am open to adding contextual alternates to give some alignment in cases where changing one glyph would disturb other combinations. of course you can always point out any rendering or design issues with singular glyphs too.
sayyadirfanali•1h ago
designer here. by symbol-heavy languages i mean languages like Perl and Haskell which make heavy use of symbols (sigils in Perl and operators in Haskell). Myna was designed after my frustration with other monospace fonts combined with my (self-imposed) inability to use ligatures.
Avshalom•48m ago
Apl, BQN and Oiua would like to talk to you.
andrewl-hn•29m ago
And some proof assistant languages and frameworks. For a second I was really excited there, but this is another font with “programming ligatures”.
sayyadirfanali•21m ago
i know the title can be a bit misleading but Myna is primarily ASCII.
languages which insist on using full Unicode like APL and Agda have bigger problems (availability of uniform glyphs and inconsistency with monospace design) on their plates. which imo is one reason why full Unicode editing hasn't really caught up.
Myna doesn't use any ligatures though. it would run on almost all terminals and editors.
andrewl-hn•13m ago
Yeah, I realize that I was wrong about ligatures afterwards. The two plusses next to each other looked as if they are a single combined glyph, but they are in fact separate. I think this is the effect you were trying to reach, and it looks very slick.
floppyd•1h ago
I appreciate the effort, but the result kind of shows why usually symbols are aligned as they are. Dashes, colons, angle brackets — all look way too high next to lowercase letter. I assume this stems from trying to align everything with brackets, and those are aligned with uppercase letters kind of naturally. But I don't think the tradeoff is worth it.
sayyadirfanali•52m ago
i understand the point you raise. but i believe symbols are generally aligned as they are because most fonts are designed for text and many monospace fonts respect those typographic traditions.
but i think code is not text and breaking some tradition improves readability.
the dash (hyphen) is actually supposed to align with the greater than symbol to resemble the arrow (extremely common symbol in C and many functional languages).
layer8•46m ago
The greater/less-than symbols look too high to me as well, also when used as angle brackets like in HTML/XML/C++/Java/TypeScript/….
adastra22•53m ago
A rust example is conspicuously missing from the README.
sayyadirfanali•52m ago
please check the illustrations below.
layer8•52m ago
I despise this style of curly braces where the arms look more like “S” than like “ʃ”. Don’t go backwards! :)
sayyadirfanali•50m ago
a few others have raised the same point. in my defense i can only say that i adore that particular style because it looks more like what i draw by hand.
layer8•41m ago
I guess it depends on what you are used to. I draw them like “ʃ” by hand, and find the more squiggly style unnecessarily noisy visually. It makes the brace direction a little less obvious to see at first glance.
sayyadirfanali•12m ago
surprisingly enough for me, the exact same point was raised by others too. meanwhile, i was totally unaware that many would find it hard to read it as i never ever had any difficulty telling them apart even with the (admittedly baroque) design of the braces. if that is the only feature stopping you from trying this, please make a feature request. maybe i could issue a "disambiguous braces" variant.
mouse_•42m ago
It's perfect. Please don't change anything about it.
evanjrowley•38m ago
How do you feel about 'l' and '1' looking so similar in Myna?
jug•17m ago
I personally love Jetbrains Mono; it's been one of a kind for me and my tastes. I like it over Consolas (although this is one is pretty good on Windows), Fira Mono, Inconsolata, Plex Mono. But I can see the effort here and I'm definitely going to give this one a try! I've found that typefaces can change a lot depending on pixel alignment and rendering engines (i.e. ClearType, GDI, FreeType, Quartz... let pixel grid decide or not, or by how much...). So it's hard to tell if this is going to win me over without actually trying!
sayyadirfanali•7m ago
if you try it please feel free to create an issue if you find some rendering bug in your system. i have tested and used it extensively on Linux but not Windows or MacOS as much as i should.
MarsIronPI•1h ago
floppyd•1h ago
The GitHub page has a list with 5 items of what was the focus, this is the first (and I think the most easily noticeable) area
layer8•58m ago
sayyadirfanali•46m ago
sayyadirfanali•1h ago
Avshalom•48m ago
andrewl-hn•29m ago
sayyadirfanali•21m ago
languages which insist on using full Unicode like APL and Agda have bigger problems (availability of uniform glyphs and inconsistency with monospace design) on their plates. which imo is one reason why full Unicode editing hasn't really caught up.
Myna doesn't use any ligatures though. it would run on almost all terminals and editors.
andrewl-hn•13m ago