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Nigel Tao, Chuck Bigelow and Rob Pike announce:
The experimental user interface toolkit being built at golang.org/x/exp/shiny includes several text elements, but there is a problem with testing them: What font should be used? Answering this question led us to today's announcement, the release of a family of high-quality WGL4 TrueType fonts, created by the Bigelow & Holmes type foundry specifically for the Go project.
The font family, called Go (naturally), includes proportional- and fixed-width faces in normal, bold, and italic renderings.
[...]
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Go fonts is their license: They are licensed under the same open source license as the rest of the Go project's software, an unusually free arrangement for a high-quality font set.
The new face is similar to B&H's popular Lucida Bright & Sans typeface variants but with many adjustments for source code readability:
The Go fonts conform to the [DIN] 1450 standard by carefully differentiating zero from capital O; numeral 1 from capital I (eye) and lowercase l (ell); numeral 5 from capital S; and numeral 8 from capital B.
While the decision to package a default font with a GUI kit is sure to raise a few eyebrows, the choice of Bigelow & Holmes should come as no surprise to those familiar with the Go team's previous work, Plan 9, and it's font offering.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday November 19 2016, @08:53PM
TFS says that "The new face is similar to B&H's popular Lucida Bright & Sans typeface variants", but the first thing that came to mind for me was that it has the same "ugly" or unpolished feel as the font of the Acme editor.
The fact that it's a serif font pretty much rules out any usage on a display, and the proportional font of course is out of the question for source code.
My first reaction was that Rob Pike is building his own personal bubble with Plan9Port, Go, and now this font. There's nothing particularly wrong with any of them and heck, they all have interesting ideas, but they all have their personal quirks and are generally isolated in their own environment without trying to play nice with established and widespread standards, solely for Rob Pike's personal preferences.
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(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday November 19 2016, @09:53PM
and the proportional font of course is out of the question for source code.
Probably be mandatory for the next version of Python, then.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday November 19 2016, @11:03PM
Now that you mentioned it, with the mandatory tab indentation of gofmt, you really shouldn't have too many issues using proportional fonts with Go.
Bonus points for Acme's Font command switching between the two :3
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @10:27PM
The fact that it's a serif font pretty much rules out any usage on a display, and the proportional font of course is out of the question for source code.
I think you're aware of this, but not making it very clear...
There's two distinct variants: one proportionally spaced, sans serif, and one monospaced, slab serif. Both are available in upright and "italic" (oblique), and are available in normal, medium, and bold weights.
It's a bit of an odd combination, but thanks in part to the concept of three (rather than four) fallback font families (serif, sans serif, and monospace), and in part to the prevalence of Courier New (bleh!) as the default monospace font, it's sadly familiar.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday November 19 2016, @10:55PM
came to mind for me was that it has the same "ugly" or unpolished feel as the font of the Acme editor.
Personally, I've used Acme for years and recently, deadpixi's Sam [github.com] and have never found fault with the font rendering. If I had to guess, I'd say Acme and Sam render fonts without hinting much like Windows and the latest versions of FreeType(https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeType-2.7-Rendering).
The fact that it's a serif font pretty much rules out any usage on a display, and the proportional font of course is out of the question for source code.
What's wrong with the monospaced slab-serif? Looks [golang.org] great to me.
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(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday November 19 2016, @11:21PM
They look quite nice to me as well, at least at that size. Isn't this the normal licence that Google et al have been releasing fonts under these days?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday November 19 2016, @11:39PM
Nah. The typical licensing for "FOSS" fonts is OFL [sil.org] which is copyleft with commercial restrictions. Go's licensing is BSD + a patent grant.
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(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday November 20 2016, @12:06AM
>What's wrong with the monospaced slab-serif? Looks great to me.
I suppose it's personal preference, but without getting into arguments about qualia, monospaced serif code is disconcerting to read. The serifs make me feel like I'm reading paper literature written in a natural language. It's similar to how reading natural language is better with proportional fonts. I'm not saying that the alternatives are less legible, just that they feel weird. I'm not a typographer, but if I were to give a scientific argument, font design depends not just on the character forms themselves, but also the environment in which they appear (paper media, indirectly illuminated, display type, resolution) and the kerning (spacing between characters). There are serif fonts design for code, so to speak, but the Go mono font feels like it's designed for natural literature, not code.
From anecdotal evidence, I've found that programmers tend to prefer sans monospaced font for code, the outliers being of questionable authority (for example, people who write code in Word or Google Docs, blegh).
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(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday November 20 2016, @12:02AM
I don't understand why this was posted in the first place, because you can find thousands of free fonts on the internet. I have lots of them on this laptop, most of which I use for graphics.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @12:09PM
>because you can find thousands of free fonts on the internet
All with the very minimal coverage - ASCII, or at best Latin1. Which translates to "useless" in most parts of the world.
Any free font with *useful* coverage is notable; there are still too few of them around, now in 2016.