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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 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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