Number One, Pipe Character, lower case L, upper case I, zero and O, Parentheses and Brackets, are so common pain points on coding and terminal fonts. Those should be painfully distinct.

The first thing I look at on ANY font is the capital "i." No crossbars? No dice.

This one has those and a distinguishable zero vs. O, so far so good.

Whoops; someone pointed out that 1 and l are indistinguishable. That's a major failing.

> Whoops; someone pointed out that 1 and l are indistinguishable. That's a major failing.

Agreed.

Maybe that's what they meant by "inspired by typewriters" (on many typewriters there was no 1, you had to use lowercase L)? But I agree that this is not a "feature" you want to have in a font that you use in terminals and/or for programming.

1’s are a luxury.

https://www.omnimaga.org/humor-and-jokes/dilbert-'we-could-o...

Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1992-09-08>

I was looking for this one.

I kinda feel like the difference between the 1 and l is still reasonably obvious, the top serif is significantly different. But it could be improved by removing the bottom left serif from the l.

I've never understood why the lowercase l and 1 so often look the same in monospace fonts. It's not like anyone actually writes an l like that — why not just a small bottom right hook? And maybe a top left hook as well? But a whole base is insanity.

My first typewriter didn't have a "1" key. You were supposed to type lowercase L when you needed a "1".

Underwood 255: https://typewriterdatabase.com/img/gunderwood%20_10166_15186...

Because of the positioning you can press "l" then backspace then "." and get a serif on the bottom which makes it look a little-more one-like.

Similarly you get a "!" by doing "'" backspace "."

> It's not like anyone actually writes an l like that

Excuse me?!

I agree that this is a bad decision for programming, but the reason most fixed-width fonts do that is that they can look visually uneven if they don't use exaggerated serifs on narrow characters. It can even get to the point where words look like they have spaces in them if the wrong characters are next to each other.

Monospace (https://monaspace.githubnext.com/) has a feature that dynamically changes between different versions of characters and moves them inside their space in the font grid to make up for that. But even so, its bottom serifs on 1, I, and l extend to both sides.

Cascadia Code (https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code) has a lower-case L whose bottom serif only extends to the right. It's the typeface I use for writing code, and IMO, it's currently the best option available.

> It's not like anyone actually writes an l like that

Counterexample: looking at https://www.nist.gov/srd/nist-special-database-19, the example in the manual has a lowercase L that’s just a vertical line.

Is that page showing the complete set of glyphs? I assumed it was a subset because I didn't see the degrees symbol ° and surely they have that.

They do line up, if you install and use the OTF version:

https://imgur.com/a/N2tNaiO

although some characters still seem to be missing, most of them work as intended.

edit: nevermind, looks like it was using Lucida Sans instead! what is going on? does the OTF only include ASCII or something?

Yeah it's driving me crazy honestly -- why put art on there if it's not recognizable as anything?? It does indeed look like the overworld from DF, but not quite coherent enough...

FWIW everyone's complaining about this so I'll throw in the recent monospace release that absolutely blew me away: https://monaspace.githubnext.com/ Who needs hackers when you have Microsoft the evil tech conglomerate pumping out fonts, anyway?

Another good Microsoft monospace font: Cascadia. Something about it just makes it super legible for me when coding in it, plus it has nerd fonts built in without needing to be patched.

https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code

I use this one, too. I also love the (optional) ligatures for things like boolean comparisons.

To me the "art" blocks look like converted stills from a movie or TV show, or from existing artwork: two figures facing each other in the first, three figures in the second, a... galloping horse with a cloaked rider in the third? But I could be completely wrong on all of that.

Which OTF renderer? freetype?

> I would think they're only supposed to just touch, with no gap, no overlap.

Because of variations on how software terminals and GUIs render fonts, this is very tricky. That’s why so many terminal programs take over box-drawing characters and implement the glyphs themselves. This way the glyphs defined by the font are a rendering failsafe and it’s sometimes better to not even implement them and leave it to the systems font substitution mechanisms.

Hardware terminals had fixed vertical spacing, which made alignment much easier.