CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ZE is way to similar to 3

A lot of domestic typefaces make the upper part of 3 be a straight line not a curve, thus making things easily distinguishable. monofur does that too (even though it has old style figures and the problem is less acute)

[jdw1996]

Just for reference, there was a discussion about this issue in Iosevka last year, and putting a flat top on the numeral three was the best solution come up with there as well.

Joseph Winters <notifications@github.com> writes:

Just for reference, there was a [discussion](be5invis/Iosevka#184) about this issue in Iosevka last year, and putting a flat top on the numeral three was the best solution come up with there as well.

Thanks. The thread was very informative.

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[chrissimpkins]

Mind posting some screenshots of the typefaces that you feel distinguish these glyphs well? What is your use case here? Are you using the fonts in source code or elsewhere? If in source, are you mixing Cyrillic in the source or is this something that you are using in string literals/comments?

Chris Simpkins <notifications@github.com> writes:

Mind posting some screenshots of the typefaces that you feel distinguish these glyphs well? What is your use case here? Are you using the fonts in source code or elsewhere? If in source, are you mixing Cyrillic in the source or is this something that you are using in string literals/comments?

pt mono and monofur distinguish them well https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/pt-mono https://www.dafont.com/monofur.font It appears that monoid has alternatives[1] mechanism for 3 https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/monoid [1] Not a typographer so my knowledge of the proper nomenclature is limited, sorry.

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Chris Simpkins <notifications@github.com> writes:

Mind posting some screenshots of the typefaces that you feel distinguish these glyphs well? What is your use case here? Are you using the fonts in source code or elsewhere? If in source, are you mixing Cyrillic in the source or is this something that you are using in string literals/comments?

Forgot about use case, there are times when I browse the web in a terminal with links [1]. On few occasions milliseconds or even seconds were spent on trying to diffirentiate what I've just read (S9 З3 are the most glaring examples). Almost no monospaced font is immune to S9, PT Mono adds what can almost be qualifed as serifs to S and it helps some, monofur has old style figures which also helps. As far as I can tell all Vera Mono derivatives suffer fom S9 - it's very hard to tell at a glance if you are looking at S or 5 (the reverse is not true for MOST faces. Along with PT Mono and monofur S9 situation is better with: unifont née misc fixed anonymous pro cmu typewriter text regular latin modern mono nimbus mono [1] http://links.twibright.com/download.php

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[chrissimpkins]

Thanks for the additional information. Can you let me know what size you are using to view the glyphs and what platform you are on?

[chrissimpkins]

Also see #423 (comment). You posted in that thread that you are using v2.019 builds. Let's get you current so that we can confirm that this is an issue with the changes that occurred as of v3.x releases.

Chris Simpkins <notifications@github.com> writes:

Thanks for the additional information. Can you let me know what size you are using to view the glyphs and what platform you are on?

I'm on linux. And the best answer to the first question i can come up with is - i don't know, there are so many variables here... I use custom fontconfig configuration (link to the way i do thing was sent previously), i also had to add `xrandr --dpi 152x152' to my .xinitrc to sctually match the physical characteristics of my monitor, etc etc... Maybe it would be better if you could describe what environment would be ideal so that i can see if it's reproducible there... (Start terminal with particular set of options, run emacs and set frame font to this or that, visit a web page, pango-view ...) I just can't find any reasonable defintion of "size", sorry :( FWIW my configuration is at: https://github.com/moosotc/snippets

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[chrissimpkins]

Mind opening any text editor on your Linux distro (Sublime Text, Atom, LibreOffice Writer etc) with your current settings, define Hack as the display typeface, and view a sample of these glyphs across text sizes 8 - 14. These are our target design ranges and where we will work on optimizations. You will be able to modify the font settings in the suggested text editors to do this. When we talk about improvements in shapes for a typeface, we are discussing different shapes on the screen at every text size because there is a constraint on the number of pixels that can be displayed to you. This leads to significant problems with differentiation of shapes at smaller text sizes because there is not much to work with for similar shapes. Sometimes when you address that issue, you create an undesired appearance at larger text sizes. We need to know what sizes are affected in order to determine whether design changes alone address it or whether we need to drill down into the instruction sets that push pixels here and there at specific sizes.

Don't modify your system settings. It is possible that you are causing a problem in our fonts with custom settings, but that is helpful information for us. I can verify against default fontconfig settings for some distros on my development VM's once I have a better understanding of the issue.

[chrissimpkins]

But update those fonts before you do any of this! Let's work in current build of Hack :)

Chris Simpkins <notifications@github.com> writes:

Mind opening any text editor on your Linux distro (Sublime Text, Atom, LibreOffice Writer etc) _with your current settings_, define Hack as the display typeface, and view a sample of these glyphs across text sizes 8 - 14. These are our target design ranges and where we will work on optimizations. You will be able to modify the font settings in the suggested text editors to do this. When we talk about improvements in shapes for a typeface, we are discussing different shapes on the screen at every text size because there is a constraint on the number of pixels that can be displayed to you. This leads to significant problems with differentiation of shapes at smaller text sizes because there is not much to work with for similar shapes. Sometimes when you address that issue, you create an undesired appearance at larger text sizes. We need to know what sizes are affected in order to determine whether design changes alone address it or whether we need to drill down into the instruction sets that push pixels here and there at specific sizes.

Sorry don't have any of those, following reproduces the problem though: $ pango-view --font='hack 15' --text='asxaxЁЖЗxasxas' ZHE really stands out there.

Don't modify your system settings. It is possible that you are causing a problem in our fonts with custom settings, but that is helpful information for us. I can verify against default fontconfig settings for some distros on my development VM's once I have a better understanding of the issue.

My custom settings are there to be reproducible, the settings are: disable hinting disable rgba provide some metric aliases do not rely on distribution "defaults"

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Chris Simpkins <notifications@github.com> writes:

But update those fonts before you do any of this! Let's work in current build of Hack :)

Sure :) Screenshots of windows created by: $ pango-view --font='hack 16' --text='asxaxЁЖЗxasxas'

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Chris Simpkins <notifications@github.com> writes:

But update those fonts before you do any of this! Let's work in current build of Hack :)

https://boblycat.org/~malc/hack-issue.html When using chromium i can easily see the issues with hack: S5, ЁЖЗ, 3З (Kerning section is just my testing template, most of the entries kern fine with Hack)

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[chrissimpkins]

Thanks for the additional data. On the list to review.