the symbols are all pure ASCII and are supposed to look normal. it is not a ligature font and neither focusses on Unicode symbols. the symbols are just more evenly adjusted with the letters and with each other.
93 karma · joined November 6, 2025
the symbols are all pure ASCII and are supposed to look normal. it is not a ligature font and neither focusses on Unicode symbols. the symbols are just more evenly adjusted with the letters and with each other.
beside if i may say so in my defense, the comparison is a bit unfair as a V (a full letter) is being compared to a caret (almost a superscript symbol). i have broken many typographical conventions but it won't make sense to break programmatic convention of the caret operator just for the alignment of the vertical arrows.
but more than preference there is matter of availability and consistency. Unicode is not available for all possible glyph combinations and many times what we see in Unicode looks quite ugly in monospace because of the width constraint.
ligatures are also not supported everywhere. that is one of the reason i designed this.
this particular font is quite simple and doesn't contain any ligatures, etc. so most of the design is in Fontforge. i didn't start from scratch. it started out as a customised version of Source Code Pro (released as Hera and currently archived in my profile) but i borrowed many glyphs from other fonts and modified many others to the point it became a different font. you can open the .sfd file directly in Fontforge to edit and modify it yourself.
but you raise a valid point. it is not entirely subjective. some obviously grotesque (no pun) kerning would need to be changed in the next version. if you can point out some obvious ones i would urge you to create an issue.
languages which insist on using full Unicode like APL and Agda have bigger problems (availability of uniform glyphs and inconsistency with monospace design) on their plates. which imo is one reason why full Unicode editing hasn't really caught up.
Myna doesn't use any ligatures though. it would run on almost all terminals and editors.
but i think code is not text and breaking some tradition improves readability.
the dash (hyphen) is actually supposed to align with the greater than symbol to resemble the arrow (extremely common symbol in C and many functional languages).