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_piud

93 karma · joined November 6, 2025

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_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
thanks for pointing it out. i would need to consider that idea.

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.

_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
thanks for pointing it out. as i mention below in a comment, there are bound to be many combinations which don't align (especially vertical ones). i would ideally tell you to invoke a feature request but i am not sure this esoteric combination could even be detected in a contextual alternate rule (which Myna doesn't support anyways for now).

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.

_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
it is partially a matter of design and code philosophy. many like the simplicity of ASCII and consider ligatures distracting.

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.

_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
thanks for the feedback. about the braces please see another comment below. the issue of needlessly complicated braces has been raised quite a few times now. a variant could be considered if there is more interest.

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.

_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
thanks for pointing it out. shouldn't be that confusing, i guess.
_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
i use this font basically everywhere and have become kinda blind to the defects. for me it looked best when glyphs are mostly centered (which makes them "genuinely monospace" if you catch my drift).

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.

_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
if you try it please feel free to create an issue if you find some rendering bug in your system. i have tested and used it extensively on Linux but not Windows or MacOS as much as i should.
_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
surprisingly enough for me, the exact same point was raised by others too. meanwhile, i was totally unaware that many would find it hard to read it as i never ever had any difficulty telling them apart even with the (admittedly baroque) design of the braces. if that is the only feature stopping you from trying this, please make a feature request. maybe i could issue a "disambiguous braces" variant.
_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
i know the title can be a bit misleading but Myna is primarily ASCII.

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.

_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
there are bounds to be many many operators and glyph combinations where things don't match properly. an example is the variable declaration and initialisation symbol in Go which combines colon and equal sign. if you use Myna and come across any such examples, please raise a feature request. i only focused on glyphs for languages i use personally. but if there is interest i am open to adding contextual alternates to give some alignment in cases where changing one glyph would disturb other combinations. of course you can always point out any rendering or design issues with singular glyphs too.
_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
a few others have raised the same point. in my defense i can only say that i adore that particular style because it looks more like what i draw by hand.
_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
please check the illustrations below.
_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
i understand the point you raise. but i believe symbols are generally aligned as they are because most fonts are designed for text and many monospace fonts respect those typographic traditions.

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).

_piud··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
designer here. by symbol-heavy languages i mean languages like Perl and Haskell which make heavy use of symbols (sigils in Perl and operators in Haskell). Myna was designed after my frustration with other monospace fonts combined with my (self-imposed) inability to use ligatures.
_piud··on Show HN: Myna - monospace typeface for symbol-heavy programming languages
designer here. thanks for trying it out. i appreciate the feedback. i like the condensed look too but didn't really think about being able to see more code horizontally :)
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