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by nnq 3676 days ago
Really bad for code though...

- the difference between uppercase and lowercase is too low making camelCase very hard to read

- the colon is aligned to the left of its space making ":=" look horrible

- "$" is hard to distinguish from "S"

- [] have funny vertical alignment

- every char is a bit wider than it should, wasting a lot of horizontal screen estate - what you want to avoid when working with 3+ columns of code on one screen

Bad compared even to Ubuntu Mono. Very bad compared to Source Code Pro. Horrible compared to Consolas.

But looks good on titles of articles referencing charity :) Seems like the intended use for a monospace font... right?

4 comments

Thanks for the feedback!

It wasn't designed for code. It was more a educational project for me to learn interpolation to "easily" create several weights of the font based on two weights. At the same time I was looking for ways to help out in any way I could with the ongoing situation re refugees here in Europe.

The "code" thing I thought was a bonus, and you're totally right. It might not work that well for code and it was never intended to compete with fonts that are intended to be used for code.

Again, I'm super grateful for you feedback and will take a look at the examples of strange looking glyphs that you pointed out. Thanks a million!

I think the only upper/lower case issue I have is with K--I think the other letters are fine.

About the colon: In many cases in typesetting, shifting the colon to the left looks better, but not always. In TeX, there's ':' for ordinary colon and \colon for the left-shifted colon. Anyway, I guess it isn't a totally absurd choice if they're really trying to target a use other than code.

I agree about $/S.

I'm not sure what you're seeing with the vertical alignment of [], they look fine to me.

More criticisms as a code font:

At the size I'd be using for code, ` is nearly indistinguishable from '.

At the size I'd be using for code, @ is just an odd circle-ish glyph (though I love it at larger sizes). And at small sizes it can be hard or impossible to distinguish it from © (I don't think you have ©, I think it's falling back to a different font).

I just wanted to let you know that I have updated Alma Mono based on feedback from this thread. Lots of fixes and reworked @-sign and $-sign e t c.
And ^ results in a blank character.
That's strange! I'll take a look, I know I designed that character! Thanks for the heads up!