But I kept coming back. Again and again, just looking through their page. I tried the trial. I eventually caved. A weird moment for me, but I bloody love this font and I frequently notice how nice it is in all my IDEs.
I sound like a shill, sorry.
This is not a this font vs. that font comment - it's about spending money on a font and how a lot of people find that a weird thing. For me, I came to the realization that it's a thing I literally spend hours every day looking at, so if spending a small amount of cash would improve that experience then why would I not do it?
Windows, 1920 x 1200 @ 96 dpi, Visual Studio, light-on-dark theme. I like 'em small to fit more on the screen and at 8px this font looks janky. It is blurry with uneven thickness and requires an eye strain to read. It doesn't seem to be hinted at all even though it is a TTF version.
Here's Berkley Mono on the left and Mensch on the right - https://i.imgur.com/CM27hVV.png
At 9px characters somehow retain their width but just get taller.
At 10px it starts looking better, but glyphs still look kinda feeble and aren't terribly pleasant to look at.
Just 2c. The character design is very nice still.
I really like the look of the font, but the hinting needs to be fixed before I'd purchase it. It's currently unusable for me.
Liberation Mono: from the very same package of fonts that are included in LibreOffice, I find it to be surprisingly readable and easy on the eyes for most kinds of code or monospaced text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
PT Mono: while initially I really liked PT Sans and PT Serif separately (they're currently the fonts for my homepage/blog), their monospaced offering is also quite nice; albeit when there's some light colored text (e.g. comments) at the smaller font sizes, the full stop character can become a bit harder to see. Here's more information about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Fonts
Here's a quick comparison, comparing the two fonts against Consolas and JetBrains Mono (with some Java code, taken from a throwaway project): https://imgur.com/a/mr9afqT
Personally, out of all of them Liberation Mono feels like the most readable, whereas PT Mono just appeals to me stylistically on some level. However, paid fonts, like the linked one are also great - whatever feels more pleasant to stare at for a large number of hours per day!
I do however enjoy setting comments using fonts that aren't monospaced (which I begrudgingly acknowledge Comic Sans is actually decent for).
At some point though the old typographers adage of "people read best, what they read most" must impact our preferences.
And this isn't even the first monospaced font I've spent money on that I know I will probably not always use. I own Operator. Dank. Mono Lisa.
But the design and the attention to detail with downloading as regards to the stylistic set defaults (for applications that don't follow/adhere/support stylistic sets, which is something I could write a whole rant on) makes me very happy to support this team.
The Liberation font don't look bad but their wideness as well as that of other common FOSS fonts like the Vera/Bitstream fonts has always bugged me for some reason. Whenever I do a fresh Linux install and the desktop is configured to use one of those I have to download and install Inter UI or Ubuntu Sans as the UI font for it to not bug me.
[0]: https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono [1]: https://rsms.me/inter/ [2]: https://design.ubuntu.com/font
However, the difficulty of distinguishing italics from regular on a presentation I can mostly forgive it since I can now recognize the italics and that hint to whatever it is trying to show much more easily than if I was trying to figure out a color (I'm not color blind but that is an accessibility issue) or the 'is that tilted enough?'
(and looking for a bit of nostalgia, https://dank.sh/ now redirects to https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono and while its done, it can be purchased again!)
I’ll have to try it. I’m still using Lucida Console because most newer fonts lack hinting for smaller sizes.
https://fsd.it/wp-content/uploads/PragmataPro_bitmaps.gif
To me, this is one of the best parts of Pragmata Pro (which I also eventually bought and has been my daily driver for years, although I do use Berkeley Mono for presentations and screenshots...)
It would be ok if the vast majority of screens were high dpi. But they are not. It’s not a question of being broke or not.
Affordable high-dpi screens are pretty much a recent thing. It keeps being rare (and expensive) on every laptop that isn’t a Mac.
Most companies bought hundreds of 1920*1080 screens in the last decade and they have no real incentive to throw them out of the window neither they feel the need to go 4K even when they buy new screens.
Good hi-dpi+multiscreen support on windows is no more recent than Windows 10 1703. On Linux it’s still garbage.
Millions of people are stuck working with low-dpi screens. It’s not like you have that much power over your employer to ask for a better screen without him changing the whole fleet because all your coworkers now wants one.
So I agree with you. In an ideal world, low-dpi should be something from the past. But it isn’t. And in our real world, the real shame is that designers (including font designers) stopped caring for the vast majority of people who don’t use a hi-dpi screen to work.
Ohh, that's a fair point. I guess it's very obvious in the comparison, when you look at something like Consolas and any of the others.
I've heard good things about Iosevka, when you care a lot about horizontal compactness: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
In fact I would've loved to try a mono version of it if it were avaiable.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/ViewSonic-VX2722-4K-OLED-27-in...
A good designer would think about how his creation will be used in the Real World IMHO.
I'm used to use DejaVu Sans Mono. Under X (Linux) it works beautifully and stays relatively readable down to 7pt; I usually set it to 11pt.
Under Windows 10, on the same screen with same DPI, I could not make it look reasonably in native programs like Notepad++; it stays blurry up until ridiculously large sizes. Emacs, which of course brings its own rendering to Windows, is able to render it somehow more crisply.
Conversely, Consolas looks wonderful under Windows, crisp and sharp. I could not make it render equally well under Linux.
And macOS is another land; it refuses to make fonts crisp if matching the pixel grid would change their shape even slightly. The only recourse is retina displays.
YMMV.
As far as 8px fonts go, there's also Dina, which is very similar, but with a pixelated look even though it's a TTF.
I'm not criticizing the people themselves but what we expect from them. Most companies will hire their designers looking at some portfolio that the recruiter barely liked. You'd better have colorful big margin mockups to show on your Retina screen rather than showing that you truly care about the fact that your end users are forced to use garbage screens with blur everywhere because they are still using VGA connectors.
I'll pass on the fact that everyone seems to agree that any single app will be used in fullscreen and that it's ok to expect enormous visual real estate. Even task management software like Jira or Todoist just never had the realization that allowing their window and the contained information to be presented in a compact way should be a basic feature.
Just for fun I tried to run Todoist on a 1440x900 resolution (which, sadly, is pretty common for non technical workers). In full screen, you cannot see more than 12 single line tasks. 12 ! On the same screen i can display a 16*39 spreadsheet at 100% zoom. Why do a modern software artificially limit you to 12 units of information and everybody looks do be fine with it ?
And if you want to resize the app for it to be tinier, you are limited to a minimal size that is barely 1/3 of the screen that shows you 7,5 tasks.
I'm not complaining about Todoist especially. If I have it installed it's for good reasons. But it's the same with barely any modern software : you'll struggle to use it if you don't happen to have the same screen as the designers.
And the designers almost always acts like the software they are working on is anyway at the center of your workflow and that it gives them the "right" to use all of your screen real estate when in fact this is super rare : I don't do my work with Todoist or Jira, they are just here to help me quickly get some information. The only software that deserves all of my pixels is the one I'm actually doing my work with (for me it's my IDE but it could be Photoshop, or Excel, or any production app ...).
So, I'll correct myself : when I say "designers don't care", i would rather say "companies don't care". What is important is that the product is visually appealing enough to ease the work of the sales department.
