Server Mono: A Typeface Inspired by Typewriters, Apple's SF Mono, and CLIs

by yankcrime • 2 years ago

356 99 2 years ago

malodyets• 2 years ago

Much good there but l and 1 are identical.

mroche• 2 years ago

I'm really surprised this made it through, it's one of the handful of character sets that require distinct glyphs to prevent confusion/mixups.

vmladenov• 2 years ago

Not quite, the 1's top serif extends to the left edge. https://postimg.cc/nXMt2qhx Still way too close for comfort.

queuebert• 2 years ago

To be fair, they did say it was inspired by typewriters, and most old typewriters don't have a '1', so you type a lowercase 'l' instead.

irundebian2• 2 years ago

That are really old typewriters.

amelius• 2 years ago

Then don't call it "server". Call it "typewriter".

rjmorris• 2 years ago

How did they type '2' on those old typewriters?

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

Yeah it's annoying in several fonts, not just that one. So I simply modify the font I'm using: one thing I do is I remove the lower left horizontal bar from lowercase 'l', that way it cannot be mistaken from a '1'.

Basically changing what's on the left to what's on the right:

    ***         ***
      *           *
      *           *
      *           *
    *****         ***

It's a little trick I've been using since so long I don't even remember since when I'm doing that.

m4632• 2 years ago

I simply modify the font I'm using

One of those minor nudges in life...

EDIT: and also a monospaced comment on hn to describe it :)

awelotta• 2 years ago

Do you use [ttx](https://fonttools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ttx.html) for this?

ezekg• 2 years ago

Love the zero, but agreed.

seanmcdirmid2• 2 years ago

I use proportional fonts for coding that don’t really distinguish between 1 and l, it doesn’t seem to matter in practice.

m4632• 2 years ago

yeah ibm's courier has a horizontal top line for 'l' and a slanted top line for '1'

IshKebab• 2 years ago

Line spacing is way too tight.

luluthefirst• 2 years ago

It makes their paragraphs hard to read regardless of the font.

ddtaylor• 2 years ago

and the Internet Development Studio Company community

This reads very PR-ish and lame.

oguz-ismail• 2 years ago

Lowercase f and r are ugly.

hahamaster• 2 years ago

Especially “r”, horrible.

java-man• 2 years ago

As an alternative, I would suggest to consider Iosevka [0]. I am using it in the browser and for coding.

[0] https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

lycos• 2 years ago

I can't put my finger on it but I don't find this enjoyable to read at all.. so I don't know much about readability claims here. Maybe I'm an outlier.

copperroof• 2 years ago

I know nothing whatsoever about readability but this almost makes me ill to read. Very unsettling.

seanmcdirmid2• 2 years ago

Type writer fonts are hard to read in general. Kerning leads to readability in general.

ecjhdnc20254• 2 years ago

The line spacing is way too tight (this is line-spacing: 1).

Obviously that is beneficial for ASCII-art (smaller vertical gaps), but plain text would benefit from at least 1.1 and maybe 1.2.

I am not a typographer but the cap height of this font (I think it's the cap height) appears quite large, when perhaps it would be better to have a slightly smaller cap height so the ASCII-art features would work well at line-height 1.0 without the letters feeling so vertically cramped.

Basically, slightly less-tall letters.

But as I say, not an expert.

fsckboy2• 2 years ago

line spacing beyond minimal ought not be an attribute of a font. I can see a "recommended" line spacing for some type of "vertical as well as horizontal beauty", but drives me nuts when choosing a font also chooses scads of whitespace.

I like to squeeze a lot of info on a page, why do other people get to say "no". Sure, space out your wedding invitation, I can deal, but on the daily text on my screen, that should be up to me.

I do prefer "typewriter" fonts that are more squoze horizontally, this one seems to have loosened the ol belt a little, maybe for more "squareness".

unnah• 2 years ago

The line spacing on the site reminds me of 8-bit computers with 8x8 pixel character cells. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript#/media/File:Speeds...

loeg• 2 years ago

I'd describe it as excessively bold/heavy.

righthand• 2 years ago

For me it’s the weird mix of serifs and san-serif letters. Just off putting and weird it kind of feels like reading a note from a kidnapper made of clipped magazine letters pasted together.

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

I don't like it. As someone else pointed out, the line spacing is too tight and that might be part of it, but I feel like it is too heavy (thick? Something in between bold and regular, whatever that is called).

deathanatos• 2 years ago

So, if you're going to demonstrate the box drawing characters — and in a monospaced font, I would — they should line up?

E.g., under "lines", the rows are overlapping; https://i.imgur.com/KnOP2Wu.png ; I would think they're only supposed to just touch, with no gap, no overlap.

The boxes, similarly, don't quite line up right. https://i.imgur.com/6pVYh9a.png (Even the 100% box isn't lining up right, although somehow what FF screenshotted != what it rendered. sigh.) The point being, you want these to tile seamlessly. Oddly, they tile differently in the pictures-of-font that break up the page. (Which I'm not sure what they're supposed to be? One is called "5af1d7a5-fa60-4827-9b4f-808cdb635d59" and has no alt text. They remind me of Dwarf Fortress though.)

As other people hint, this seems like the line height is cramped. I/l/1 ambiguities is a deal breaker for any terminal font, though.

LoganDark• 2 years ago

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?

worewood• 2 years ago

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.

DidYaWipe• 2 years ago

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.

bobbylarrybobby• 2 years ago

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.

criddell• 2 years ago

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.

bbor• 2 years ago

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?

bitvoid• 2 years ago

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

zerocrates• 2 years ago

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.

sylware• 2 years ago

Which OTF renderer? freetype?

rbanffy3• 2 years ago

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.

riiii• 2 years ago

Moaning about my personal preference, it's not for me. I find the letter shapes inconsistent and line spacing is too narrow. My eyes hurt after reading a few lines.

But hey, well done on getting it out the door!

replete• 2 years ago

line-height: 28px !important

It's not very readable with line-height set to the x-height, ironically. Cool font though.

Find some old demoscene / warez ansi headers and show it put some on the homepage perhaps?

vincent-manis• 2 years ago

I'm also not enthralled with this. Mind you, I really like Cascadia Code, which in its 2024 iteration includes NerdFonts characters. Finally, something done by Microsoft that I can recommend unreservedly!

Uehreka• 2 years ago

Not sure what the images on this page are supposed to be, they don’t load in iOS Safari. Also I’m not seeing the 1/I/l confusion other people are talking about, so it’s possible the font isn’t rendering in Safari either and it’s falling back to the default monospace font.

beala• 2 years ago

Here's how it looks on safari mobile for me. The lowercase l and 1 are exactly the same. https://imgur.com/a/I2r2ZQ6

eddyg2• 2 years ago

I’ll just mention Berkeley Graphics and the excellent Berkeley Mono.

https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono/

GlacierFox• 2 years ago

$75? Haha Holy s...

eddyg2• 2 years ago

I also highly recommend PragmataPro⁽¹⁾ if you prefer more characters per line. It’s €199 for the complete typeface, but well worth it for something you interact with for many hours per day, every day. More than 9000 characters have been hand-optimized from 9pt to 48pt to guarantee the best possible readability. (You can start off with the “Essentials” variant for only €19, which is definitely a bargain!)

⁽¹⁾ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

bowsamic• 2 years ago

Fonts are gear acquisition syndrome for software developers

jen729w• 2 years ago

I presume you’re indicating what an outstanding bargain this is?

For something you look at the entire day? Every day? Seventy five bucks, once?

I have the full licence as I use this typeface professionally. It’s the best money I’ve ever spent.

Void_• 2 years ago

My favorite!

graboid• 2 years ago

I love this font.

usefulcat• 2 years ago

Tangential, but I quite like this quote: “Just as the scientist must think and experiment alternately, so the artist, the author and the scholar must alternate creation or study with participation in the life around them.”

fernly• 2 years ago

For those commenting on the importance of character ambiguity, I completely agree, and offer "DP Sans Mono", a font specifically designed for unambiguous proofreading.

https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/DP_Sans_Mono

https://www.pgdp.net/c/faq/font_sample.php

font download link at https://www.pgdp.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=70714

pwg3• 2 years ago

Given the emphasis on being unambigious, it is interesting that the capital-eye (I) and lower case-ell (l) are the identical glyph in DP Sans Mono.

adiM• 2 years ago

They are significantly different!

ghostly_s• 2 years ago

A single weight font doesn't really meet the needs of modern CLI environments does it?

And I don't get what the ASCII art have to do with anything. What does it depict? Screenshots from some scifi movie?

And finally oh god, l and 1 are literally the same.

jmprspret• 2 years ago

Wait what? Do you seriously need bold fonts in your terminal? I find them annoying. I would much prefer a single weight.

nutrie• 2 years ago

It may not be just that. I sometimes end up using the light weight to improve readability, especially on light background, plus in some cases regular is more like semi-bold.

YarickR2• 2 years ago

Perfect line spacing, other fonts have it way too wide between lines, screen feels half-empty. Great font, switching to it . Medium weight would be lovely, though

byte_0• 2 years ago

I am not sure if I like the font or not, but I do like the corpus of text used to demonstrate the character rendering. At first glance, I thought it was Quenya or Sindarin, but I am not too sure.

andyferris• 2 years ago

Nitpick: the acknowledgements make a cute usage of "thy" and "thou hast". However, they actually refer to multiple individuals, and need to use "your" and "you have". Boring, and wrecks the aesthetic, I know...

__mharrison__• 2 years ago

Interesting choices for 1 and l...

voidUpdate• 2 years ago

Personally, for a monospaced font, I prefer Jetbrains Mono. It's free and looks nice to me

y_fucimo• 2 years ago

It might be better to create a website with a light theme, especially for a typeface inspired by typewriters.

I just can't read it.

throwaway81523• 2 years ago

Why do we need another font like this? It looks ugly anyway, plus has the other problems people mentioned about character distinguishability.

h4ch1• 2 years ago

after trying a myriad of "programming" fonts, nothing feels more comfortable than Pragmasevka [0], a mix of PragmataPro and Iosevka.

[0] https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka

AnthonBerg• 2 years ago

After reading through the thread, I want to show my warm and honest appreciation for Server Mono.

I like the art! I like the feel and… idk, visual rhythm? One man’s inconsistent is another man’s lively. I like the tight linespacing; Am of the opinion that line art glyphs should touch each other across lines – of course! – but it can’t be solved at the font level. We need console-oriented text rendering that knows how to connect those glyps. Could be done automatically but seems awkward. Could be done even better with, say, some kind of anchor points embedded into the font file – in a particular UNICODE location maybe?

And I for one don’t really mind I and l and 1 looking similar. Distinct is better but I am fond of the historic imperfection. O and 0 absolutely need to be distinguishable though! haha

morning-coffee• 2 years ago

How far back from the monitor should I be to be able to interpret what the ASCII art blocks are showing? Seems like maybe they were inspired by those 90's "Magic Eye" pictures.

paulcarroty• 2 years ago

Great SF improvements, waiting for Nerd Fonts version :)

lelanthran• 2 years ago

That image at the top looks like petsci art.

cormullion• 2 years ago

Font seems to not include the '<', '>', or '=' characters. I sympathize with font designers, there are so many glyphs you have to stare at - hundred if not thousands - for days and weeks on end; eventually you get tired of seeing them...

drewhk• 2 years ago

Well, instead of complaining here about 1 and l, I just filed a ticket on their GH repo and it already got resolved... https://github.com/internet-development/www-server-mono/issu...

fouc2• 2 years ago

I just saw it was updated. Great news!

Added missing symbols + - =
Changed the top of 1 to distinguish from letters.

https://github.com/internet-development/www-server-mono/rele...

mercacona• 2 years ago

I liked the 1=l because I thought it was intentional. This quick “fix” unsettles me.

inglor_cz• 2 years ago

Just a comment from behind the former Iron Curtain, I am really happy that you included letters with diacritics.

When it comes to ÁĚÝŘŠ etc., the Iron Curtain still sometimes rears its head from the screen, even in 2024.

Server Mono: A Typeface Inspired by Typewriters, Apple's SF Mono, and CLIs

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