Slashdot Mirror
"Hack" Typeface Is Open Source, Easy On the IDEs
Ars Technica writes that "At SourceFoundry.org this week, programmer Chris Simpkins debuted the 2.0 version of Hack, an open-source typeface designed specifically for use in source code." The revamped font is "characterized by a large x-height, wide aperture, and low contrast design in order to be 'highly legible' at common coding text sizes," and the font specimen shows how legible it is right down to downright tiny sizes, though Simpkins says the sweet spot is between 8 and 12 pixels.
Hack's roots are in the libre, open source typeface community, and the project expands upon the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects. ... Simpkins has been working on the project throughout 2015, and he tweeted that this latest version includes "new open type features, changes in weights, significant changes in spacing, Powerline glyphs, and more." The typeface now comes with four font styles: Regular, Bold, Oblique, and Bold Oblique.
But where can I see it? Where's the damn link?
Fantastic, an article without links...
I know we don't read articles around here, but are we ready to give up even the pretense?
Gotta love that link to the original article ...
leather-dog muksihs
Blog: @muksihs
I know I know.. nobody reads the article. But here's the link:
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
No link to the article or the actual typeface being discussed? I'd call this lazy reporting, but it isn't even news. It's just a blurb.
Thanks for the link, i was really curious about what it looked like.
Ars Technica writes that "At SourceFoundry.org this week, programmer Chris Simpkins debuted the 2.0 version of Hack, an open-source typeface designed specifically for use in source code." The revamped font is "characterized by a large x-height, wide aperture, and low contrast design in order to be "highly legible" at common coding text sizes," and the font specimen shows how legible it is right down to downright tiny sizes, though Simpkins says the sweet spot is between 8 and 12 pixels.
Hack's roots are in the libre, open source typeface community, and the project expands upon the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects. ... Simpkins has been working on the project throughout 2015, and he tweeted that this latest version includes "new open type features, changes in weights, significant changes in spacing, Powerline glyphs, and more." The typeface now comes with four font styles: Regular, Bold, Oblique, and Bold Oblique.
Thanks for the link Slashdot.
OH WAIT
It's Deja Vu Sans Mono with some questionable changes to glyph shapes, sizes, and spacing. There's a sore lack of comparison with other programming fonts; Ars is making it out as though we've all been stuck on Courier New until this point, but that's ridiculous. I'd like to see a comparison with, e.g., Consolas, Deja Vu Sans Mono, Courier New, and others.
THE ACTUAL LINK. This is where you go to download the font.
just looks wrong to me, and it's already distinguished by the dot above it.
Seriously, barely any difference between the two.
From the descriptions of this font, I expected it to be some new awesome thing, but it's basically just a few tweaks on top of Deja Vu Sans.
Does this mean I have to abandon comic sans for my Visual basic coding in MS VS??
A link would be highly appreciated.
How do you add this to Firefox or Chrome under Linux?
The way TFS mishandles nested quotation marks is much worse. In a typography thread, for crying out loud!
It looks similar to Adobe Source Code Pro.
Similar design goals . Also open source on github.
To my eyes Source Code Pro looks more refined.
Did they suddenly forget that not everyone blurs the hell out of their text with cleartype? On my screen this allegedly wonderful font looks like it's been run through ten rounds of jpeg compression.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
It looks a lot like Andale Mono, or several other Mons for that matter.
Still it looks nice and having yet another font can't hurt too much, right?
http://www.drehersoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Font-Table-Size-2.png
there. legible, clean and jaggy, just like mom used to make.
That @ sign looks horrible and the 0 looks like a vajayjay.
Excellent font design, almost as good as Liberation Mono.
It's quite ugly. The letter "i" for example, gahh. And too wide (can we say "kerning" about the fixed width fonts?).
Instantly back to "Consolas".
Nice that it includes some non-ASCII chars (extended Latin-1). But not IPA, which makes it hard for linguists. There are plenty of variable width fonts that cover IPA etc., but fewer fixed width fonts.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's a small minority of users who need this...perhaps one (me). (I used it when writing up computational linguistics in XeLaTeX.) So I'm not complaining!
Please no more of these. I stopped going to that tech toilet Hacker News because of all the "my dumb product and how it's revolutionary" pseudo news bullshit.
It's just Deja Vu Mono with a few changed chars. Big deal.
...does it feel like another deja-vú
Fixedsys is the one true font.
I'm just saying.
This animation shows DejaVu Sans mono vs Hack.
http://i.imgur.com/8SqL6mT.gif
Hack is the image with the red square
#awkward #ripoff
If editors would support elastic tabstops, then we would not be limited to fixed width fonts for code.
Looks good. I'll give it a try.
However, the ttf version has a problem in Emacs: There is a lot of horizontal space between the characters. About 1/2 the character width.
I do not see this problem in xterm or other applications. Also the font looks fine in the emacs font selector dialog (that's the GTK2 dialog).
The otf version looks fine in Emacs
Looks good to me, but I use a proportional font for coding because it's easier for me to read. Proportional fonts are supposedly superior for reading text, but I'm not sure how that translates to code. However, the only real advantage I've seen to monospace is that you can use it to line up columns, provided your tab use doesn't prevent that. The only thing I line up in my code is the indentation, and for that I use tabs. The exact size of the indent therefore depends on the tab size. It would be nice to be able to use one tab before inline C-style comments and have those align to the same place, but most (all?) editors just seem to render tabs as a number of spaces.
This is the example reference I am using
I'm not sure I like the "i" too much. The design is nice, but the position of it isn't so much.
I think it would be better if they moved it across 1 pixel. Considerably better. The spacing on the left side is just too weird.
Maybe even shorten the tail just a bit. 1 pixel as well would probably do it.
It is hard to get kerning right with fixed width, but this and other vertical line characters need the most love when it comes to position.
Not a fan of that "g" either. I think the tail is too cramped.
Drop them legs girl. Oh, sorry, leg. So sorry, I keep forgetting the accident.
The "p" and others could probably be better with a little extra bottom length actually.
Other than that, pretty damn good font really.
Will try it out on holiday and see how it goes.
Got it. Thanks!
The point of this is being effective not pretty
A few months ago I became frustrated with the standard monospace fonts used on the various platforms I use regularly and decided to find a personal standard to replace them all. I settled on Anonymous Pro: http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro
. . . something, something . . . my cold, dead fingers from terminus. . . . .
Maybe I'm just getting old, but... 8 pixels? That's incredibly small on any modern display. If you're stuck in a low-resolution environment I can see that as being a benefit, but...
Love sees no species.
www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html has open old-fashioned dot-matrix fonts for ASCII and Unicode. They tend to be readable in small sizes.
I maintain it still kinda ugly. Too skinny, or something, and I very much dislike the numerals. It's ok though, I'm allowed. I just don't see why ppl keep getting so excited about it. Maybe Consolas says too much about my character.
It goes by several names, including Monaco 9, fixed, and 6x13, all of which are quite similar. We don't need another.
...on a real DEC VT102 display. A friend's dad had one and there were a few in some of the CompSci labs and I remember them being very readable, even in 132 column mode.
I don't think it would be a question of just making a font with the same dots in the same places in a matrix. It was like the character set was designed for the way the video display would render it, providing just the right amount of phosphor blur to create good looking text. Which is probably exactly how it worked.
Reproducing it for a modern computer would probably take having a real VT102 with a nearly new stock display and doing a lot of side by side comparisons to get it to look the same.
I've largely given up on a custom "programmer" font and just learned to be satisfied with Lucida Console, since it works more or less on every Windows system as well as in putty sessions to non-Windows systems.
What about Monoiod? It sounds like Monoiod may be a better choice for many. Sounds like it does not have the same drawback,s.
http://larsenwork.com/monoid/
https://github.com/larsenwork/...
It isn't plagiarism it is proudly based on DejaVu (and others, but don't get down off your high horse just to acknowledge that).
From the quote in the summary: "Hack's roots are in the libre, open source typeface community, and the project expands upon the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects."
And what exactly is wrong with taking something good and making minor changes? It's like requiring every new model of car to reinvent the wheel, differential joint, gear box, etc. lest it be an "#awkward #ripoff".
someone has something to say about security? is it clear for all SO's and browsers?
Ø is a letter, not a number.
The article states that some countries recognize exclusive rights in typefaces for terms ranging from 14 to 25 years. Monaco and the other original Mac fonts came out in 1984.
Digital outline fonts (.ttf, .otf) are subject to ordinary copyright as computer programs because there is more room for originality in control point placement and hint programming.
That's because five years ago, Ubuntu was shipping with DejaVu Mono, and Hack's website admits that it's a modified DejaVu Mono.
I'll just leave this here
This is a fantastic font.
"Low contrast", WTF?! Low contrast typefaces patently suck for readability. I don't think anyone is so stupid as to believe that low contrast is good for readability, but if there is anyone that stupid, see this. There's a website you don't have to squint and strain to read.
http://christfollower.me/misc/glasstty/
https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font
There, your coding-font problems are solved. You're welcome.
For bitmap fonts also see:
http://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~uwe/misc/uw-ttyp0/
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
For source code I prefer Tristan Grimmer's Proggy fonts, MIT licensed. For wide screen ProggyTiny is the just the best.
As long as it's not proportional or excessively silly/frilly/fancy I can't say I care much what don't I'm coding with.
Mind you, bring back 8x16 grid fonts and I'll be a very happy coder!
Hack is basically, a slightly rounded-corner Monaco. I use Monaco for my text-editor and had to look twice to see the difference. I guess, being opensource is the only real plus
""Combine it with an HD monitor and you can comfortably work at 6 or 7px sizes.""
Yeah no, not with my eyesight. I'd love to have eyes that could read text that small...
Hack looks just fine in Visual Studio, though some of the characters feel a bit wider than I'm accustomed to, leading to less whitespace between characters. Previously used 'Consolas'. I did have to completely restart the IDE after changing the font setting, which I did not expect.
They don't have an "lorem ipsum" sample on their webpage.
:)
Just kidding. It looks very nice for console use. I will probably try it out.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Very clear apart from the lowercase 'i' which to me doesn't look like an 'i'. It's too wide. My brain is used to seeing 'i' as a tall think character and doesn't recognise this 'i' as being an 'i'.
I don't like it, but I might get used to it. I'll give it a try for a while.
I tried it in my (Windows) console and there is far too much leading. Is that the correct word? Too much vertical space. Lucida Console is worlds better for MS CLI use.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I use Source Code Pro and when I tested hack I lost about 8 lines of code. I like to see as much of my code as possible so a taller font is not an improvement.
I have tried dozens of monospaced fonts over the years hawked as the best new coding font. Invariably I go back to using Monaco, an Apple original but available for the PC as well. This font looks like a squished version of Monaco to me. Since I am already using dedicated glasses for computer work, I don't think taking a font and squishing it will work for me.
I've been using Terminus for about a decade and you can rip it from cold, RSI'd hands.
--Pete
Yes, but how is the fonts ceming?
The font is quite nice, but the glyph for the lowercase "i" is WAY too close to a lowercase "l" for me.