The way they talk about it makes it sound like they invented the written word, but that notwithstanding the fonts actually look really nice in my opinion.
Some people care more about having fancy tools than actually doing work with them.
On reddit, I used to subscribe to the VS Code subreddit. A lot of posts were just about themes, people asking “what theme is this” or posting their latest minor recolor. Meanwhile, I’m there for posts about actually using the damn thing.
Great idea but the name texture healing is terrible. It’s not healing anything and there are no textures with fonts. Dynamic or flexible weight makes a lot more sense.
I agree that texture healing is a bit too vague about that they’re really using it for. Its really for kerning pair without disrupting the monospaced grid. Maybe, since the audience for these fonts aren’t usually typographers, they should have called it Monospaced Kerning Pairs?
Texture is a term and feature of typefaces in design however. Usually described for fonts used in body text, or larger blocks of text.
While it probably doesn’t affect shorter lines of text used in most coding languages, it can be harder to read when smaller sizes are used. Monospaced MmWw are the worst culprits.
One memorable observation on typographic texture was made by Heinz Peyer, a Swiss poet, who said that reading a text composed in Helvetica was like walking through a field of stones, whereas reading a text in Syntax was like walking through a field of flowers. (23)
Form is often susceptible to logical analysis, and pattern somewhat so, but texture evades precise description because its repetitions are so numerous, its features so small, and its interactions so refined, that the multifarious complexity of the emergent image resists orderly analysis. Texture requires a holistic more than an analytic under standing.
Ironically the second paragraph is turning out to be largely incorrect with smarter ways to analyze blocks of typeface texture. Also this second paragraph nicely illustrates the utter wankery present in a lot of typography circles and analysis.
Gotta justify that grad school bill somehow (pun intended).
Like kerning pairs, but with character swapping instead of kerning adjustments. It’s a really clever use of the language features available in Unicode.
Yeah, I looked at the first couple of fonts, then read all that stuff about readability this, state of the art that, expressive palettes la-di-da and I thought “ok maybe they have an idea here”.
Then I looked at the rest of the examples and ran into that… thing. Like, the fucker’s so aggressively irritating to read that you could use that font to hide eg. backdoors in code, and reviewers would instinctively skip over those parts just to avoid the pain.
Contextual alternates are normally used for certain scripts, like Arabic, where the shape of each glyph depends on the surrounding glyphs. And they are also used for cursive handwriting fonts where the stroke of the “pen” might have different connection points across letters. Texture healing is a novel application of this technology to code.
basically fonts were already capable of using alternate versions of characters based on their nearby characters, so they used that for these fonts to allow for seemingly-dynamic sizing/spacing
This swapping is powered by an OpenType feature called “contextual alternates,” which is widely supported by both operating systems and browser engines.
Do modern IDEs allow for setting different fonts for comments, human written code, Copilot written code, etc? I don’t do much actual coding these days, so it’s been a while. I’m used to just seeing different colors but for things like comments and reserved words, but not fonts like they showed in the examples.
Looks lovely! The art of fonts is something I will never understand but always appreciate. This website is also brilliant in showing everything dynamically and explaining why it all matters. Safe to say Github will start using it everywhere? It’s also open source, which is nice (and makes sense considering what Github is striving for).
Edit: Not 100% sure on texture healing though. Toggling it on and off in the example makes me feel like texture healing makes everything look weirder. It makes the font look less monospace which should be good, but it just messes with my mind when some letters look slightly different in different contexts. Like the spacing is not immediately obvious to me and having the same letters look different is throwing my mind in a loop. I guess I’ll need to try it to see if it’s comfortable.
I like Hack as my font of choice, but I will probably give this a shot. It’s a font, there is no risk of data collection, Microsoft style bugs, or other Microsoft-associated product issues.
In my web browser I personally use uBlock Origin to just block all remote fonts and browse with a JS disabled by default policy. It’s an annoying but necessary compromise, in my opinion.
Also, in Firefox v118 a new feature was introduced to curtail the font fingerprint route as well: “The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts to mitigate font fingerprinting in Private Browsing windows.”
I’m sure you know this, but for anyone else scrolling through the comments it is actually ridiculous how much data websites can query and receive to fingerprint users from the web browser. Just look at https://amiunique.org – “WHY IS THIS ALLOWED?” is the question I have asked for many years now.
Could be used in combination with other metrics to identify a specific user’s movements through a site over time, if the other metrics aren’t unique enough.
Possibly, but when you have time as a realiable metric already, you dont need another metric that ticks down at an unknown and inconsistent speed, and goes up once in a while. Hell, I keep my laptop plugged 99% of the time.
Some of it is incredibly difficult to imagine how to do in a private way, too.
For example, my browser can display AVIF images.
If my browser announces in the Accept “hey, I’m able to display AVIF images. Please send me AVIF images if you have them rather than JPEG”, that helps to identify me, since most browser don’t display AVIF, which sucks.
But I really want to get AVIF images: they’re efficient.
So how do I announce that I want AVIF images without announcing that I want AVIF images?
Some of the other web features were well-intentioned but have just ended up being useless.
Like your browser also announces what language you prefer.
Like “hey if you a German version of this text, please send it to me in German, thanks”.
But for some reason EVERY WEBSITE IGNORES THIS and just says “oh you speak Spanish and English but you’re travelling in Russian right now? HOPE YOU LIKE READING RUSSIAN FUCKER”.
So it’s 100% only used for invading privacy now.
Some of the tracking mechanisms never should have been allowed in the first place (like timezone and which fonts I have installed), but some of them (like Accept) I can’t think of how to do in a secure way.
Reading some marketing blurb about how these fonts are totally like state of the art and will make everything better is different from buying into what it claims, I guess?
Personally I’m not all that convinced that these’ll be as revolutionary as they make them sound – and Radon is so bad that it makes me question whether the claims about readability and whatnot have any connection to the fonts they published – but I’ll have to give them a whirl anyhow.
Apparently, as ugly as it is, comic sans and similar fonts are supposedly easier to read at a glance than your typical monospace font. I can’t stand it so I don’t use it myself, but some people prefer it due to that.
With Comic Sans I can maybe buy that claim; it was never hard to read, people just think it looks silly (especially in more official contexts.)
At least to me Radon, however, actually is hard to read. I don’t know if it’s my slight dyslexia, but it feels like it’s purposefully doing the opposite of what the fonts like Comic Sans etc. did. It’s not quite Tengwar-bad but it’s still a bit of a jagged easily-confused mess that’s noticeably slower to read
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One superfamily.
Five fonts.
And my three variable axes.
More fonts is nice, I’ll give it a try
Love Neon. Very easy to read.
This seems neat, too bad it requires IDE support. Hope JetBrains IDEs support it soon.
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I’d never bother changing whatever default font the editor comes with and I don’t understand why anyone would care to
Some people care more about having fancy tools than actually doing work with them.
On reddit, I used to subscribe to the VS Code subreddit. A lot of posts were just about themes, people asking “what theme is this” or posting their latest minor recolor. Meanwhile, I’m there for posts about actually using the damn thing.
deleted by creator
That was interesting how they adjusted sizes based on adjacent letters. Good idea
Great idea but the name texture healing is terrible. It’s not healing anything and there are no textures with fonts. Dynamic or flexible weight makes a lot more sense.
I agree that texture healing is a bit too vague about that they’re really using it for. Its really for kerning pair without disrupting the monospaced grid. Maybe, since the audience for these fonts aren’t usually typographers, they should have called it Monospaced Kerning Pairs?
Texture is a term and feature of typefaces in design however. Usually described for fonts used in body text, or larger blocks of text.
While it probably doesn’t affect shorter lines of text used in most coding languages, it can be harder to read when smaller sizes are used. Monospaced MmWw are the worst culprits.
—Source
Ironically the second paragraph is turning out to be largely incorrect with smarter ways to analyze blocks of typeface texture. Also this second paragraph nicely illustrates the utter wankery present in a lot of typography circles and analysis.
Gotta justify that grad school bill somehow (pun intended).
Edited for spelling
Oh interesting! In that vain, it does make sense. Thanks for taking the time to explain that.
Getting major Marvin Gaye vibes.
When I get to squinting, I want… textural healing
Like kerning pairs, but with character swapping instead of kerning adjustments. It’s a really clever use of the language features available in Unicode.
Looks really good, but I’ll stick with my favourite M+ Code, which I use in iTerm2, Emacs, and VSCode.
https://www.programmingfonts.org/#mplus
Also in https://www.nerdfonts.com/
Edited to add: they have semiwide and wide, but no condensed? Weird. That contextual resizing is pretty cool though!
I do not like the “C” in that font.
Calling it now, Radon will become the new Comic Sans.
Honestly I could see radon for comments only. It makes it clear that it’s a comment by the font alone.
not on my machine! every time someone posts a screenshot with a handwritten font it’s less readable and looks bad
I can too. I’ve seen something like that before. It was interesting, but not interesting enough for me to care about it as a feature.
Except I like reading the comments…
Yeah, I looked at the first couple of fonts, then read all that stuff about readability this, state of the art that, expressive palettes la-di-da and I thought “ok maybe they have an idea here”.
Then I looked at the rest of the examples and ran into that… thing. Like, the fucker’s so aggressively irritating to read that you could use that font to hide eg. backdoors in code, and reviewers would instinctively skip over those parts just to avoid the pain.
I mean, Comic Code is pretty damn good.
I can’t believe how no one seems to have mentioned how beautifully made this website is though. Absolute pleasure to scroll through on mobile.
Would this work in vs code only?
It’s a font. It’ll work anywhere
Even the textual healing? That seems to require a dynamic process that analyses the text, no?
Or are fonts capable of that?
basically fonts were already capable of using alternate versions of characters based on their nearby characters, so they used that for these fonts to allow for seemingly-dynamic sizing/spacing
I was actually gonna ask about this point, thanks for the context.
It’s in the article:
Open type fonts have these capabilities built in. It’s up to the designer to implement it in useful ways like this.
Do modern IDEs allow for setting different fonts for comments, human written code, Copilot written code, etc? I don’t do much actual coding these days, so it’s been a while. I’m used to just seeing different colors but for things like comments and reserved words, but not fonts like they showed in the examples.
Not copilot code specifically, but you can select different fonts for comments and regular code, yeah
Cascading Code failed to impress me, although I’ll give this one a try, I doubt it’s better than Consolas.
Looks lovely! The art of fonts is something I will never understand but always appreciate. This website is also brilliant in showing everything dynamically and explaining why it all matters. Safe to say Github will start using it everywhere? It’s also open source, which is nice (and makes sense considering what Github is striving for).
Edit: Not 100% sure on texture healing though. Toggling it on and off in the example makes me feel like texture healing makes everything look weirder. It makes the font look less monospace which should be good, but it just messes with my mind when some letters look slightly different in different contexts. Like the spacing is not immediately obvious to me and having the same letters look different is throwing my mind in a loop. I guess I’ll need to try it to see if it’s comfortable.
I like Hack as my font of choice, but I will probably give this a shot. It’s a font, there is no risk of data collection, Microsoft style bugs, or other Microsoft-associated product issues.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/91347/how-can-a-font-be-used-for-privilege-escalation
Not a serious rebuttal. But yes, MS has found a way for Windows to be vulnerable to attacks using fonts.
What the…
I meant to link the CVE sorry. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2011-3402
I used Dejavu Sans for like 10 years, and Hack is the perfect incremental improvement. I’ve tried to use other fonts but I keep coming back to Hack.
TeamViewer checks for a font their app installs when visiting their website to fingerprint you.
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/teamviewer-font-privacy.html
FFS
Thanks
In my web browser I personally use uBlock Origin to just block all remote fonts and browse with a JS disabled by default policy. It’s an annoying but necessary compromise, in my opinion.
Also, in Firefox v118 a new feature was introduced to curtail the font fingerprint route as well: “The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts to mitigate font fingerprinting in Private Browsing windows.”
I’m sure you know this, but for anyone else scrolling through the comments it is actually ridiculous how much data websites can query and receive to fingerprint users from the web browser. Just look at https://amiunique.org – “WHY IS THIS ALLOWED?” is the question I have asked for many years now.
Fuck me sideways.
Also, I’d remove battery charge metric from the fingerprint. Since it changes over time, I wouldn’t really consider it a good or even usable metric.
Could be used in combination with other metrics to identify a specific user’s movements through a site over time, if the other metrics aren’t unique enough.
Possibly, but when you have time as a realiable metric already, you dont need another metric that ticks down at an unknown and inconsistent speed, and goes up once in a while. Hell, I keep my laptop plugged 99% of the time.
That is insane the amount of info given. I had no idea. Thanks for the website
Because people want to have features in their web browsers and originally no one really designed the web with security in mind.
Some of it is incredibly difficult to imagine how to do in a private way, too.
For example, my browser can display AVIF images. If my browser announces in the Accept “hey, I’m able to display AVIF images. Please send me AVIF images if you have them rather than JPEG”, that helps to identify me, since most browser don’t display AVIF, which sucks. But I really want to get AVIF images: they’re efficient. So how do I announce that I want AVIF images without announcing that I want AVIF images?
Some of the other web features were well-intentioned but have just ended up being useless. Like your browser also announces what language you prefer. Like “hey if you a German version of this text, please send it to me in German, thanks”. But for some reason EVERY WEBSITE IGNORES THIS and just says “oh you speak Spanish and English but you’re travelling in Russian right now? HOPE YOU LIKE READING RUSSIAN FUCKER”. So it’s 100% only used for invading privacy now.
Some of the tracking mechanisms never should have been allowed in the first place (like timezone and which fonts I have installed), but some of them (like Accept) I can’t think of how to do in a secure way.
That Krypton font do looking nice
Yeah, like, since when does Microsoft put out something both functional and cool, ya know?
Like Age of Empires?
Well, their previous fonts are nice, Calibri etc
deleted by creator
Did you read it?
Reading some marketing blurb about how these fonts are totally like state of the art and will make everything better is different from buying into what it claims, I guess?
Personally I’m not all that convinced that these’ll be as revolutionary as they make them sound – and Radon is so bad that it makes me question whether the claims about readability and whatnot have any connection to the fonts they published – but I’ll have to give them a whirl anyhow.
Apparently, as ugly as it is, comic sans and similar fonts are supposedly easier to read at a glance than your typical monospace font. I can’t stand it so I don’t use it myself, but some people prefer it due to that.
With Comic Sans I can maybe buy that claim; it was never hard to read, people just think it looks silly (especially in more official contexts.)
At least to me Radon, however, actually is hard to read. I don’t know if it’s my slight dyslexia, but it feels like it’s purposefully doing the opposite of what the fonts like Comic Sans etc. did. It’s not quite Tengwar-bad but it’s still a bit of a jagged easily-confused mess that’s noticeably slower to read
Too bad I’m married to JetBrains Mono.
Does anyone know if Jetbrains Mono also does the whole dynamic width thing?
Don’t think it does.
Could elaborate on what the “dynamic width thing” means?
The text healing that is mentioned in the link
Letters like m and I are still same pixel width, you just use function of openfonts to shift letters and replace with wider version where possible.
#[ i ][ w ]
Becomes
#[ i ][\/\/]
Like how Neo flexes in the hallway and the entire Matrix flexes around him, except with wide letters like ‘m’.
I broke up with JB Mono a while ago :'(