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  • Hacker News
  • Looks good. Won't ever buy a font though.
  • Bought MonoLisa back in 2022, never even considered switching coding typeface since. Before that time I used to switch every 3-6 months.

    It's really well balanced easy on the eye.

  • Regarding coding, the characters “:={” are all vertically centered differently.
  • Similar to Input Mono font, which is superior to Monolisa in pretty much any way I can think of, plus free. https://input.djr.com/
  • I find them quite different, to be honest. I would not call them similar at all apart from being in the same design space of fonts for displaying code.
  • I call all these new fonts monofonts, mono in the sense of monoculture. Aesthetics practically indistinguishable from each other. Give me one of the IBM Selectric fonts in a modern form and I'll be happy as a clam.
  • You might like Pitch: https://klim.co.nz/fonts/pitch/
  • https://www.codingfont.com/ is a fun way to compare fonts side by side and see just how similar some of them really are. Also kind of fun to see if your favorite font makes it through a blind comparison bracket.
  • Seems there's no way to disable the <= ligature without disabling whitespace ligatures? I'm not all too crazy for real ligatures but whitespace adjustments otherwise seem nice.

    Also, as it's so finely adjustable, would love if they'd offer some variants for dot and comma, to increase their size, because that's my number one problem with fonts since age 45.

  • Can you open an issue at https://github.com/MonoLisaFont/feedback/issues ? Maybe that's something we missed while restructuring ligatures for customizability.
  • Classic marketing pricing strategy. Suddenly what has been seen as cheap is now given airs of luxury, exclusivity and craftsmanship.

    If you are really serious about your work… and you are, aren’t you? Then $150 is nothing, it’s a reflection on how serious you are. An artist needs great tools… etc etc

  • There are artist in 3rd world countries that make that in a month.
  • Looks decent but $250 AUD for a font? Even for local and personal use? That's... a lot. I was thinking if it is paid and it was around $25 I'd consider it, then I saw the price!
  • Yeah, I've read the entire website, but I still don't understand how a font for programming can be worth that much.
  • > MonoLisa ships as a variable font with two axes. Weight gives you every cut from Thin to Black in a single file — no megabytes per style. Grade fine-tunes typographic color by adjusting stroke thickness without changing glyph widths

    If any web page designer reads this, weight 1 and grade -50 is what many web pages look like, or even thinner than that. Weight 300 and grade 0 are the lower boundary of readability IMO.

    A free (as money) font with most of those properties is Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, both monospace and variable width. https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

  • Thanks for this alternate!
  • Atkinson Hyperlegible is an incredible font family! I read much faster and strain much less when I use it. The Braille Institute licenses it under SIL and includes the Glyphs 3 source files used to build it with the download too which is very cool.
  • Looks interesting.

    > The Licensee may not modify, translate, adapt, alter, decompile, disassemble, decrypt, reverse engineer, change or alter the embedding bits, the font name, legal notices contained in the font software, nor seek to discover the source code of the font data, convert into another font format, create bitmaps, add or subtract any glyphs, symbols or accents, or any other derivative works based on the electronic data in this product.

    This is why I haven’t bought it. I like to subset fonts to reduce the size. Any font license that prohibits this just gets ignored by me, no matter how good it is.

  • I asked around about this particular term. It seems it's strict like that because looser wording would allow resales in certain parts of the world.

    That said, I see no problem in subsetting or customizing the font especially in personal context. The website even provides tooling for this purpose so it's definitely within the license since you are literally creating your own custom version on the fly.

    I hope this clarifies why it seems to be a standard clause for fonts.

  • Yeah, sounds like you can't even screenshot it.
  • IANAL, but isn't most of that unenforceable in the US? Typefaces have their own weird place in IP law which is different from copyright.
  • $149 for a font for personal computer use is kind of steep! I would pay $20 for this, but the value has to be pretty high to pay $149 when there's a huge selection of free fonts on nerdfonts.com, of which many are pretty great. Like what does this font really offer that makes it so pricey?
  • I bought the first version for far less. I couldn’t believe how much they wanted this time around.
  • I have bought Berkeley Mono back in the day, and I use it everywhere, everyday. One of the best purchases I did ever.

    Free fonts are nice, but some paid options are polished to a different level.

    See: https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono

  • If you’re going to stare at it year in and year out, getting the best fit for yourself is worthwhile. I shelled out for PragmataPro ages ago and have no regrets there.
  • I bought Operator Mono circa 2020 for even more — still rocking it today. Seems like a no big deal for a thing you keep looking at for many hours every day.

    kiliman/operator-mono-lig on github patches it to support ligatures. And I wish Hoefler guys added support for more languages

    Video and some code screenshots: https://typography.com/blog/introducing-operator

    Character set: https://typography.com/fonts/operator/overview

  • I'm more of a bitmap font guy (at least, as long as my eyes continue to forgive me for it) but I'm always interested to see what other fonts there are around. It does look quite nice.

    I must admit when I ran across the second real paragraph from the main page, I couldn't help but only think more and more about how we will look back on marketing copy like this in a decade from now:

    AI assistants produce both code and prose. MonoLisa Text renders long-form explanations with optimal readability, while MonoLisa Code keeps your code crystal clear. The perfect pairing for the AI era. (Under the title "A perfect pairing for the AI era.")

    Ignoring the deep pit of sadness I felt when thinking about the incredibly long (and revolutionary) history of typefaces that led us to today for just a moment, I'm honestly curious how effective this marketing is. How many people would assume a font would be suitable for general text but not LLM-generated text and would need to be dissuaded from that notion? I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting" (but I'm too scared to look at this stage).

  • I think a lot of people might be excited by a typeface or other text system that would highlight tells of LLM "tainted" text.
    by a96
  • I've taken recently to running bitmap Terminus (not the ttf) in my terminals. I find the lack of blurred edges to be extremely refreshing. My laptop has a pixel density of about 162 ppi, so normal fonts, especially in chrome on linux don't make me happy.

    Do you recommend any specific bitmap coding fonts?

  • > I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting"

    I don't know about such marketing copy, but keyboards with a "CoPilot key" are now standard, particularly on all Windows laptops, which is an even more egregious form of marketing.