Anarcat: 2024-05-29-playing-with-fonts-again

meta title="Playing with fonts again"

I am getting increasingly frustrated by Fira Mono's lack of italic support so I am looking at alternative fonts again.

This time I seem to be settling on either Commit Mono or Space Mono. For now I'm using Commit Mono because it's a little more compressed than Fira and does have a italic version. I don't like how Space Mono's parenthesis (()) is "squarish", it feels visually ambiguous with the square brackets ([]), a big no-no for my primary use case (code).

So here I am using a new font, again. It required changing a bunch of configuration files in my home directory (which is in a private repository, sorry) and Emacs configuration (thankfully that's public!).

One gotcha is I realized I didn't actually have a global font configuration in Emacs, as some Faces define their own font family, which overrides the frame defaults.

This is what it looks like, before:

Fira Mono

After:

Commit Mono

(Notice how those screenshots are not sharp? I'm surprised too. The originals look sharp on my display, I suspect this is something to do with the Wayland transition. I've tried with both grim and flameshot, for what its worth.)

They are pretty similar! Commit Mono feels a bit more vertically compressed maybe too much so, actually -- the line height feels too low. But it's heavily customizable so that's something that's relatively easy to fix, if it's really a problem. Its weight is also a little heavier and wider than Fira which I find a little distracting right now, but maybe I'll get used to it.

All characters seem properly distinguishable, although, if I'd really want to nitpick I'd say the © and ® are too different, with the latter (REGISTERED SIGN) being way too small, basically unreadable here. Since I see this sign approximately never, it probably doesn't matter at all.

I like how the ampersand (&) is more traditional, although I'll miss the exotic one Fira produced... I like how the back quotes (`, GRAVE ACCENT) drop down low, nicely aligned with the apostrophe. As I mentioned before, I like how the bar on the "f" aligns with the other top of letters, something in Fira mono that really annoys me now that I've noticed it (it's not aligned!).

Here's the test sheet I've made up to test various characters. I could have sworn I had a good one like this lying around somewhere but couldn't find it so here it is, I guess.

ASCII test

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890-=
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()_+

ambiguous characters

&iIL7l1!|[](){}/\oO0DQ8B;:,./?~`'"$

all characters in a sentence, uppercase

the quick fox jumps over the lazy dog
THE QUICK FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG

same, in french

voix ambiguë d'un cœur qui, au zéphyr,
préfère les jattes de kiwis.
VOIX AMBIGUË D'UN CŒUR QUI, AU ZÉPHYR,
PRÉFÈRE LES JATTES DE KIWIS.

Box drawing alignment tests:                                          █
                                                                      ▉
  ╔══╦══╗  ┌──┬──┐  ╭──┬──╮  ╭──┬──╮  ┏━━┳━━┓  ┎┒┏┑   ╷  ╻ ┏┯┓ ┌┰┐    ▊ ╱╲╱╲╳╳╳
  ║┌─╨─┐║  │╔═╧═╗│  │╒═╪═╕│  │╓─╁─╖│  ┃┌─╂─┐┃  ┗╃╄┙  ╶┼╴╺╋╸┠┼┨ ┝╋┥    ▋ ╲╱╲╱╳╳╳
  ║│╲ ╱│║  │║   ║│  ││ │ ││  │║ ┃ ║│  ┃│ ╿ │┃  ┍╅╆┓   ╵  ╹ ┗┷┛ └┸┘    ▌ ╱╲╱╲╳╳╳
  ╠╡ ╳ ╞╣  ├╢   ╟┤  ├┼─┼─┼┤  ├╫─╂─╫┤  ┣┿╾┼╼┿┫  ┕┛┖┚     ┌┄┄┐ ╎ ┏┅┅┓ ┋ ▍ ╲╱╲╱╳╳╳
  ║│╱ ╲│║  │║   ║│  ││ │ ││  │║ ┃ ║│  ┃│ ╽ │┃  ░░▒▒▓▓██ ┊  ┆ ╎ ╏  ┇ ┋ ▎
  ║└─╥─┘║  │╚═╤═╝│  │╘═╪═╛│  │╙─╀─╜│  ┃└─╂─┘┃  ░░▒▒▓▓██ ┊  ┆ ╎ ╏  ┇ ┋ ▏
  ╚══╩══╝  └──┴──┘  ╰──┴──╯  ╰──┴──╯  ┗━━┻━━┛           └╌╌┘ ╎ ┗╍╍┛ ┋  ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█

MIDDLE DOT, BULLET, HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS: ·•…
curly ‘single’ and “double” quotes
ACUTE ACCENT, GRAVE ACCENT: ´`
EURO SIGN: €
unicode A1-BF: ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬­®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿

HYPHEN-MINUS, MINUS SIGN, EN, EM DASH, HORIZONTAL BAR, LOW LINE
--------------------------------------------------
−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
——————————————————————————————————————————————————
――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
__________________________________________________

So there you have it, got completely nerd swiped by typography again. Now I can go back to writing a too-long proposal again.

Sources and inspiration for the above:

• the unicode(1) command, to lookup individual characters to disambiguate, for example, - (U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, the minus sign next to zero on US keyboards) and − (U+2212 MINUS SIGN, a math symbol)

• searchable list of characters and their names - roughly equivalent to the unicode(1) command, but in one page, amazingly the /usr/share/unicode database doesn't have any one file like this

• bits/UTF-8-Unicode-Test-Documents - full list of UTF-8 characters

• UTF-8 encoded plain text file - nice examples of edge cases, curly quotes example and box drawing alignment test which, incidentally, showed me I needed specific faces customisation in Emacs to get the Markdown code areas to display properly, also the idea of comparing various dashes

• sample sentences in many languages - unused, "Sentences that contain all letters commonly used in a language"

• UTF-8 sampler - unused, similar