zlacker

>>davidb+(OP)
The "Texture Healing" feature is a really smart use of OpenType features to make problematic monospace combinations look much better without breaking the grid at all.

One naive way to do this would be to create ligature pairs for difficult pairs (mi, lm, etc). But instead, they seem to be selecting character alternates that fill the fixed width differently based on their surroundings.

>>turnso+B7
So many people here are now praising texture healing, but to me its just half-way measure. Why are we as a community so resistant for adopting variable-width fonts? This texture healing already breaks perfect character cell grid, so in some ways it feels like worst of both worlds.

I feel at least partially the same about fancy ligatures; we could just use the actual characters in source code, Unicode is widely supported. Raku does that, but it would need better typesetting (with variable-width fonts) to really shine.

>>zokier+Lq1
thats not what it does - it maintains monoSPACE while chaning the characters to not look the same width -- the best of both worlds, if anything

>>lionko+ds1
Its ok but instead of uneven spacing you get uneven character widths.

It might be ok but there is a reason why type designers make every character to be the same and try to balance everything including spacing.

Monospaced fonts designs are dictated exactly by that limit of fixed character+fixed space.

But maybe the “healing” might not be verydistracting.