Intel's New Font For Low-Vision Developers Is Causing Design Drama For Coders (fastcompany.com) 96
Elissaveta M. Brandon writes via Fast Company: There's a new font in town -- and it's already causing rifts on Reddit. The font is called Intel One Mono, and as its name implies, it was designed by tech giant Intel, together with New York-based type design practice Frere-Jones Type and marketing agency VMLY&R. It joins a group of monospaced fonts designed primarily for developers -- think JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, and Consolas. By definition, monospaced fonts consist of characters that have the same width and occupy the same horizontal space, making it easy for coders and programmers to tell the difference between long strings of characters. But here's where Intel One Mono stands out: it was designed with and for low-vision developers. (It's free to download on GitHub and will soon be available on Google Fonts, too.)
To ensure the font was legible and readable to its target audience, the team ran more than a dozen "live testing sessions" with visually impaired developers who were asked to write code using Intel One Mono. [...] Some of the feedback the designers received was particularly surprising. For example, some people were struggling to tell apart a capital "M" from a capital "N," most likely because both letters have two vertical stems and some diagonals in between, which can be confusing. To make the letters more legible, the designers sloped the vertical stems on the "M" so it looks close to an inverted W. "The point at which the two diagonals meet in the middle gets shifted up to make it clearly a V shape in the middle, and then the two verticals get flared out a little bit to give it slightly more differentiable shape from the capital N," says Fred Shallcrass, a type designer at Frere-Jones Type.
Similar challenges kept coming back with the "x" and the "y" which people struggled to distinguish, and the "e" and the "c." In every instance, the designers meticulously tweaked the letters to make them highly distinctive, resulting in a fairly idiosyncratic font where every glyph is as different as possible from the other -- all the way down to the curly brackets, which can best be described as extra curly. This brings us to that Reddit rift. "This font would be great were it not for those curly braces," one person wrote. "For someone that hates fonts sometimes because of curly brackets not being clear and evident, I'm officially switching to this font set because of the curly brackets," wrote another. The developers were equally torn, but the designers stand by them. "Part of our thinking in negotiating those responses is that reinforcing the identity of any shape is not just amplifying what is unique about that letter, but also making it clearly not some other letter, so foreclosing any confusion," says Tobias Frere-Jones, the founder and lead designer at his eponymous studio. "If there's a thing the curly braces do, which is that extra back and forth movement, the parentheses don't do that, the brackets don't do that, therefore these ought to do a lot of that."
To ensure the font was legible and readable to its target audience, the team ran more than a dozen "live testing sessions" with visually impaired developers who were asked to write code using Intel One Mono. [...] Some of the feedback the designers received was particularly surprising. For example, some people were struggling to tell apart a capital "M" from a capital "N," most likely because both letters have two vertical stems and some diagonals in between, which can be confusing. To make the letters more legible, the designers sloped the vertical stems on the "M" so it looks close to an inverted W. "The point at which the two diagonals meet in the middle gets shifted up to make it clearly a V shape in the middle, and then the two verticals get flared out a little bit to give it slightly more differentiable shape from the capital N," says Fred Shallcrass, a type designer at Frere-Jones Type.
Similar challenges kept coming back with the "x" and the "y" which people struggled to distinguish, and the "e" and the "c." In every instance, the designers meticulously tweaked the letters to make them highly distinctive, resulting in a fairly idiosyncratic font where every glyph is as different as possible from the other -- all the way down to the curly brackets, which can best be described as extra curly. This brings us to that Reddit rift. "This font would be great were it not for those curly braces," one person wrote. "For someone that hates fonts sometimes because of curly brackets not being clear and evident, I'm officially switching to this font set because of the curly brackets," wrote another. The developers were equally torn, but the designers stand by them. "Part of our thinking in negotiating those responses is that reinforcing the identity of any shape is not just amplifying what is unique about that letter, but also making it clearly not some other letter, so foreclosing any confusion," says Tobias Frere-Jones, the founder and lead designer at his eponymous studio. "If there's a thing the curly braces do, which is that extra back and forth movement, the parentheses don't do that, the brackets don't do that, therefore these ought to do a lot of that."
Try "San Francisco" from 1984 Macintosh (Score:1)
The original Macintosh's San Francisco [fontsinuse.com] font had very, unique characters. Sure, it wasn't monospaced but that's nothing some white-space padding can't fix.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
rsilvergun is harmless. That dude wouldn't hurt a fly. Even though it's not for a lack of trying, the outcome is the same.
Re: (Score:2)
Wingdings 2. VERY unique characters AND monospace.
Re: (Score:2)
OMG, that's hideous.
Re: (Score:2)
The original Macintosh's San Francisco [fontsinuse.com] font had very, unique characters. Sure, it wasn't monospaced but that's nothing some white-space padding can't fix.
Looking at the new font, it looks fine. At least it isn't comic sans.
Re: (Score:2)
The original Macintosh's San Francisco font had very, unique characters
And it was perfect for generating ransom notes too!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I had forgotten all about that font.
It's funny on a couple of levels.
LK
Killer feature (Score:5, Informative)
It feels a little vertically squashed compared to the defaults, but I think that's because it's got more letter-spacing horizontally. Looks great though.
Re: (Score:2)
Right? They are not "pretty" but I don't mistake them for square brackets...ever. And I don't need pretty in my IDE I need productive.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Killer feature (Score:2)
The brackets are the only things that's maybe a bit "over the top" with this font, which was a positive surprise, because from the description I expected it to be ugly as hell. All the visibility compromises on the other glyphs feel quite natural.
I can probably live with super-squiggly squiggly braces too.
Vomited because of the curly braces (Score:2)
The most gawd-awful curly braces ever. Absolutely would NOT use for that reason alone.
Otherwise too much white space.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Because, when I draw a curly brace with a pen (remember those? quite likely some of the children here don't) one of it's prime characteristics is to be to easily differentiated from the preceding (and succeeding) levels of parenthesis.
I'm off to d/l it, and see how it works into the equation editor in LibreOffice.
Re:Vomited because of the curly braces (Score:5, Insightful)
The best thing about this font, is that in making it legible for people with difficulties seeing, it is by nature also great at even smaller sizes for people with normal sight. I like having a good chunk of code in my IDE when I work, and this font has let me drop an extra point from the small sizes I usually use. Well done.
Vomited because of the curly braces
That's not dramatic at all. Just don't get any on me.
Re: (Score:2)
An excellent point!
I tend to use large fonts on a large screen viewed from a good distance, and then zoom out when I want an overview of larger functions, or to work on multiple smaller functions simultaneously.
With this one I can zoom out to a ridiculous level - it's still quite legible at 1/3 my normal font size, giving me over 120 lines visible at once. I'm not sure I'll ever actually use such small fonts, but I may bump down my normal size to squeeze a few extra lines in.
Re: (Score:2)
The curly braces look like something out of an art deco font. They're not horrible but they're also not wonderful. I could get used to them but.....eh.
Re: (Score:2)
then turn them sideways, to catch it before it gets on the furniture!
Re: (Score:2)
Better yet, you can tweak certain details, like the shape of the lowercase "a".
Re: Killer feature (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
More apps should let you specify the line spacing separately from the font.
Using The Font. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Using The Font. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Using The Font. (Score:4, Funny)
I read vitrectomy as vasectomy and wondered how badly the surgery must have went to cause eye damage. Maybe I too should have my eyes checked.
You were warned that if you kept "programming" on the screen like that for hours that you'd go blind...
Re: (Score:2)
But maybe not by your urologist?
I like the font, including the braces (Score:2)
See, you wouldn't have read that wrong if you had installed the Intel Mono One font, where the letters are unmistakeably distinct, and also the emoji for vasectomy and vitrectomy are so different.
Okay, all kidding aside, I'll weigh in on this too. I love the curly braces. Clear, distinct, and stylish.
But when I install the font on GVim, the lines are spaced a bit
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, that was the issue that sent me back to DVSM as well.
Tried it. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I have poor eyesight and tried this font. I didn't care for it.
I'm legally blind (retinas destroyed) and can only see a few words at a time. (Just part of a line, and there are holes and artifacts and blurry even then. My minimum font size is 56 pt.)
And I agree with you. I didn't like this new font at all. For one thing: too much whitespace. I mostly use Monaco for code and command lines and such.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
The lowercase r is a bit strange looking. I mean, it's not so weird that you can't tell what it is or
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
no ligatures? (Score:2)
It looks great in my opinion. Very readable and all.
But a coder font with no ligatures is not in the same league as JetBrains Mono and Fira Code
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Really? I dislike ligatures in practice (I assume you mean for operators?). They're great in theory, but I find they're prone to misrepresenting complex operator sequences since they don't follow the exact same parsing rules as the language. 99.9% of the time they're great, but that just means I start to trust them them and that last 0.1% bites me in the ass hard.
Re: (Score:2)
I can't stand them myself. I honestly don't see the appeal.
Somewhat of an exaggeration (Score:5, Insightful)
That Reddit thread doesn't seem to contain all that much drama - and certainly no more than is present in pretty much every discussion I've ever seen about any font at all.
Re:Somewhat of an exaggeration (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That Reddit thread doesn't seem to contain all that much drama
Are you kidding! Two people disagreed on the internet. This is NEWS WORTHY!!!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I don't agree with you!
VGA Font for me (Score:4, Informative)
I use a modified font based on the IBM 9x16 VGA font. Modified because it's TrueType so at larger sizes it doesn't get pixellated, but is smoothed. Modified because it supports Unicode too.
https://int10h.org/oldschool-p... [int10h.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Topaz from Amiga OS 2.04 onwards. Sans serif.
If you don't like a font change it (Score:5, Insightful)
Use the font you want to use. Unless people are wasting bytes by screenshotting their sourcecode, it shouldn't matter.
Re: (Score:3)
Unless people are wasting bytes by screenshotting their sourcecode, it shouldn't matter.
Oh, so *that's* why my git repositories get so big...
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Front is a personal choice. Stop moaning about one and simply use another one. Apparently a lot of people are not aware they can make their own selection.
Re: (Score:2)
oh, i'd love to!
sadly, visual studio does not even *show* all fonts installed
and for quite a few of those that you're lucky to be shown, it downright ignores your choice and uses Courier.
Re: (Score:2)
What do you mean. It's under Tools, Options, Environment, Font and Colors. I can set any font I want, Courier New, numbers as magenta, as god intended.
I hope they differentiate I and l (Score:2)
I'm too lazy to actually RTFA, but I hope they clearly distinguish between upper-case "i" and lower-case "L". Even people with perfect eyesight can't tell the difference.
Re:I hope they differentiate I and l (Score:4, Funny)
I installed the font, it is quite clear now: I l
much better.
Re: I hope they differentiate I and l (Score:2)
Nothing seems to look like anything else, according to the picture on Intel's website.
Except for 3: hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash are pretty indistinguishable. I don't know how they would have differentiated them, short of putting some extra marker above/below the line, but for all the attention they paid to everything else, and as someone who always makes sure to use an en-dash instead of a hyphen when indicating a number range, like in a copyright date year range, I'm surprised they didn't come up with SOM
Re: (Score:1)
It's for code. Computer programs are written in ASCII. Dashes are off topic.
Re: I hope they differentiate I and l (Score:2)
You must not have a lot of experience writing code if you've never had to deal with unicode characters. Off the top of my head... strings meant to be displayed in the UI... processing input... or simply putting a copyright as a comment at the top of a source file. There is more to code than the language's keywords and syntax.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And how long do you think that is going to remain true?
Re: (Score:2)
In Japanese monospaced fonts, the tradition is that everything that's not ASCII (or halfwidth katakana) is a double wide character, coinciding with their 2 byte length.
That seems to be a good compromise that would allow wide characters (such as the em-dash) to coexist with monospaced characters.
Re: (Score:3)
The image presentation (first link on Reddit) ends specifically with a comparison of those characters side-by-side. Not sure if that's a common typography idiom, but seems like a good idea.
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/130394986/233751533-e7e48e6f-a448-4a37-988e-4cfc2bcc2d60.png [githubusercontent.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
you cant see it here, but yes they do this one nicely.
Love is the most quantifiable abstraction (Score:1)
Looks good, gonna try it. (Score:2)
They sure made a point of making the chars extra distinguishable. That's a specialty among the recent slew of coder-fonts. The lineup looks interesting, I'm gonna try it out.
Thank you! (Score:1)
Thank you for posting this. I was using Consolas and didn't pay it much mind, other than bumping the font size from 10 to 12 the other day out of necessity.
I tried the IntelOne Mono font and must say works great! Definitely does what they set out to do, and I have no problem with the curly brackets -- they sure are curly, which is, I guess, the point.
Bringing the font size down again proved no problem. Nice one! And, I for one am glad it works on my AMD CPU. :)
Nerd Font (Score:2)
Hopefully someone will make a nerdtont for this so we get things like folder icons in nvim. I imagine it wouldn't be hard for someone who knows how fonts work internally to make a program that takes a target font, in this case Intel One, and a nerdfont donor, say Hack, and then copy any characters from Hack that don't occur in Intel One into the target font, producing a new font called "Intel One Nerd Font" or something. It would certainly be better than nothing.
Very low vision dev here (Score:1)
I REALLY appreciate this font set! If it weren't for High Contrast Mode, Magnifier (and its color inversion mode), Dark Reader (esp!!), Windows' DPI settings, and large font modes (serch "make text size bigger" in Settings), I'D be on SSI and in a truly horrible place.
Re: (Score:1)
Oh, and the "Inverter for Nocturn" Chrome extension to make most pictures viewable for me. I simply cannot read anything with a light background. Even a sheet of paper is blinding!
Re: (Score:2)
I guess it's ok to give praise to MS but it was Intel that actually made the font (or at least collaborated to create it). 8^)
clickbait (Score:2)
Sorry, but this is is a fake debate used as clickbait. The "rift" invoked by the article is an archlinux subreddit with mere 74 comments, where the majority is positive about this font.
Re: (Score:2)
at least we can see that subreddit! lol
Re: (Score:2)
It's not a presentation font. It's a work font. And the people that need it aren't going to see aesthetics or the lack thereof. They're just trying to tell one letter apart from another and fit more than one line of text on their screen.
Animated gifs of a font (Score:2)
Good job Frere-Jones on sending FastCompany only animated gifs of the font for illustration
slow news day? (Score:2)
The "rift" is like two guys who have mildly different but equally positive opinions on the font.
No need (Score:2)
Why would anyone use anything else than Curier New?
Python (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Clearly you're not using dictionaries enough.
Seems less legible than Monaco (Score:2)
I switched my terminal from Monaco to IntelOne (kept size to 12) and it seems a bit less legible to me. Kind of vertically squashed and some characters more of a blur (e.g. @) compared to before.
Drama? Over a font? (Score:2)
It's a font, and there are plenty. If you like it, use it. If you don't, don't. I have to pick a lane - either the drama is real, and the coding community needs a sound thrashing, or the article is dumb and pointless.
I'll go with the latter, if only because the number of twits necessary is lower.
I tried it. It's not bad. If it were my only option I'd probably be okay with it. But I landed back in Fira Code. I also like Ubuntu Mono... I find it very easy on the eyes.
Got nothing on Helvetica (Score:1)
Zapp... (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Selecting a Coding Typeface (Score:2)
Fonts that you have to stare at all day, every day, are a very personal thing, like a favorite keyboard, or favorite chair. For roughly 20 years, I was using ProFont [programmingfonts.org] (a/k/a ProFontWindows), but last year I switched to Iosevka [programmingfonts.org].
Really? (Score:2)
But can it do uppestcase and lowestcase? (Score:2)
Tom7 made much more controversial fonts trying to get to the absolute top and bottom of fonts [youtube.com], with varying success...
Distinguishing long strings (Score:2)
"...monospaced fonts consist of characters that have the same width and occupy the same horizontal space, making it easy for coders and programmers to tell the difference between long strings of characters": I don't think so. The reason you use monospaced fonts in coding has to do with making things line up vertically. If anything, monospaced fonts make it *harder* to tell the difference between long strings, precisely because every character takes up the same box, and also because some characters inevita
Normally no user-testing? (Score:2)
makes it sound as if testing your product with actual users - and listening to them is - absolutely heretical in the world of font design.
Which, to be honest, I could believe.
This is SUPER Clear (Score:1)