[somat]

Has anyone ever made a monospace font with dynamic kerning? Which is a silly thing I never thought of until I read the above comment. This sounds nonsensical at first glance(and it may be) but hear me out.

We use monospace fonts for a reason, they stack in a grid nicely. But within the confines of that grid there is room to shift a character left or right a bit which may lead to a nicer to read monospace. (it is equally likely to lead to a hideous mess, every time a letter would shift left it would leave a larger space right)

[roblabla]

Monaspace has a feature called "texture healing" that does something similar: it allows bigger letters to "steal" space from adjascent smaller letters, to make it easier to read. The result is that the letters are still in a grid, while still allowing for bigger letters to "breathe".

https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/blob/main/docs/Textu...

It's the main reason I use monaspace as a font.

[bityard]

I'm open to trying it, but my gosh, having one 'w' offset slightly by a few pixels from the one right above it feels like it would drive me bonkers eventually.

And: doesn't this result in text that "jumps around" as you type?

[stavros]

Only at most one letter jumps around, the previous letter you typed.

[gavinray]

What a brilliant idea, neat. Thanks for the link.

[Lalabadie]

iA Writer has Mono, Duo and Quattro fonts, with the latter two being almost monospaced. They concede some size variations for specific characters (Duo has 150% width characters, Quattro also uses 50% and 75% for narrow characters).

It's a fun subtle adaptation to keep close to the typewriter-like experience of the app.

https://ia.net/topics/a-typographic-christmas

[alfirous]

Duo is perfect middle ground between monospace and proportional sans, in my opinion at least. There's also Trispace[1].

https://etceteratype.co/pages/trispace

[kccqzy]

Shifting a letter left or right a bit can break the grid. What if the user writes the text that keeps triggering left shifts? A better solution is to use ligatures, so that specific character combinations look better while the ligature can maintain the overall width correctly.