Greek characters feel too caligraphic and out of place...? about juliamono HOT 13 CLOSED

Hi George, thanks for the comments.

The varphi/phi issue is quite well-known (eg this Stack Exchange question), and Consolas is one of the fonts considered to be "wrong". (We've already been here, though, haven't we?)

Font caching by the operating system is very aggressive - it can be quite hard to update fonts sometimes. (Which makes developing and testing a bit difficult: imagine recompiling source code and seeing the old bug still appear.) In fact, some have even suggested to restart the computer to guarantee successful removal of fonts. I've found deleting them and installing updates works 70% of the time. Since you're on Windows, your font caching may be better or worse, who knows?

As regards the design, I wouldn't say calligraphic is a good description (although if the pen nib was very blunt, perhaps...), but there's definitely some variability there - which I quite liked, as a contrast to the Latin alphabet and general Unicode rectangularity. If I get round to spending much more time on this, I'll try to improve the Greek characters, but don't expect anything to the level of Consolas (2007) or Roboto (2013) which have been around for years and were designed by paid type designers. Perhaps I'll create a Kickstarter to fund me for a research visit to Greece. :)

If you're looking for the sans-est possible Greek alphabet, try Iosevka, which is ruthlessly constructed by code, and doesn't have any variability.

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They're Consolas, Julia Mono, then Roboto from top to bottom, I think.

I think Julia Mono looks less nice for writing whole Greek sentences, but I think the use case being optimised for is individual Greek characters being used as in Math, for which the greater contrast with the Latin characters is probably desirable?

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I'll try to improve the Greek characters, but don't expect anything to the level of Consolas (2007) or Roboto (2013) which have been around for years and were designed by paid type designers.

Don't worry my friend, I never expected a Julia font to begin with ;)

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hahahahaha

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Perhaps this is a stylistic preference, but for a mono font, I would think that the basic greek alphabet should be as sans as possible, and the vertical heights as consistent as possible (see top example, where only four vertical levels exist at which characters can start and stop)

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I agree that some of the Greek letters have a different "feel" compared to the Latin letters, they feel much more like a serif font, and sometimes italic (like the kappa in the example above).

Re Phi vs phi, this is what I get in Emacs with JuliaMono 0.015:

I think the capital Phi rests on the baseline, as it should, and the lower-case, non-curly phi has lower height than in your screenshot, @Datseris. Is it really the case that when you change font, curly and non-curly phis are swapped?

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Yes, one of the two fonts swaps the standard "latex" phi for the "standardly used in Greek language" phi (which is the curly one).

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Re: capital Phi: my main concern is that it is very clear in the Roboto font to tell apart capital and non capital. In your emacs it looks just as clear though! Could there be some weird interplay with VScode specifically?

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I have no idea. Have you checked that you are using the latest release? I think the capital Phi was fixed in 0.014.

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I've downloaded the fonts from current master, the juliamono-ttf.zip file. Perhaps that was forgotten to be updated.

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Current version (0.016), compared with Consolas and Roboto Mono.I might do some more modifications some day...

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(which one is which?)

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This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions!

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