I make monospaziati they are sets of monospaced characters. That is, each character, regardless of its type, occupies the same amount of horizontal space. This means that every letter and symbol has the same width, regardless of its shape or size. In short, each character is aligned on a fixed grid, occupying a uniform space. For this reason, in fact, we also speak of monospaced font.
Ever since the first teleprinters were used (they date back 100 years), letters used fixed spacing. With the advent of graphical interfaces for personal computers, the proportional fonts: In this case, the individual characters have a different width. More closely resembling handwriting, proportional fonts offer a more natural look than monospaced ones.
When it is useful to use monospaced fonts
Monospaced fonts are very useful in different contexts, especially in activities related to programming. For it software development, the use of monospaced fonts makes it easier to write and read code. Regular character alignment simplifies code structuring and improves readability. Not at all all text editor and integrated development environments (IDE) use, by default, monospaced fonts.
Not only. The terminal window, in any operating system, uses monospaced fonts: here too the motivation is clear and has to do with both better readability of commandsand with the rendering of table structures using normal characters, without resorting to graphic resources.
During operations comparison (diff) e fusion (merge) of your code, monospaced fonts simplify the process by showing changes in a clear and organized way.
Again, monospaced fonts allow you to create ASCII-art i.e. graphic creativity using special characters and keyboard symbols, by create tables in text format, to format documents with precise spacing.
This last concept deserves a brief explanation. Word tabs and any wordprocessor they allow to precisely align texts written using proportional fonts. Precisely because the character widths are not the same, a system is needed to align everything. You know the “improvisation” used by many which consists in pressing the space bar to align texts placed on multiple lines? Well, with proportional fonts it is impossible to obtain the desired effect; with the monospaced ones yes.
Monaspace: GitHub releases a set of monospace fonts
GitHub Next has announced the availability of a large set of monospaced fonts, freely customizable and usable in any context: Monaspace. The font family Monaspace in turn includes the subfamilies “Argon”, “Neon”, “Xenon”, “Radon” and “Krypton”.
The license SIL Open Font License is clear: it grants permission to use, study, copy, merge, incorporate, modify, redistribute and sell modified and unmodified copies of the character set. The goal is to foster the collaborative development of font-related projects, supporting type creation efforts by the academic and linguistic communities. The open framework and free ensures that fonts can be shared and improved collaboratively with other users.
The download page on GitHub allows you to access the Monaspace character sets and use them in your projects and in various applications, including text editors and IDEs.
Key Features of Monaspace
As mentioned above, Monaspace offers five character styles: each style has a distinctive characteristic, but they are all compatible with each other, so much so that it becomes possible to mix and match them freely. The system uses three variable axes (weight, width, inclination) which help to customize the appearance of the text in detail.
The innovative technique Texture Healing addresses the problem of texture irregular in monospaced characters, improving readability without compromising the monospaced grid. In the case of monospaced characters, in fact, the visual perception can erroneously return an unequal distribution of spaces and densities. Texture Healing tries to compensate for these irregularities by more evenly distributing the density between the characters, though preserving alignment monospaced.
The ligature are stylistic combinations of two or more characters that are combined to form a single glyph or symbol. The practice is especially common in proportional fonts and are commonly used for improve aesthetics text, readability or resolve character overlapping issues (think letter combinations like “fi”, “fl”, “ff”, “ae” and so on). Monaspace, despite being monospaced, includes 8 groups of code ligatures, organized into stylistic sets.
Finally, Monaspace fonts adapt well to a wide range of programming languages such as JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Java, Python, C++, PHP and so on.
How to install Monaspace fonts in Windows and macOS
Monaspace fonts can be added to your collection of free fonts. However, we suggest that you refrain from installing all of them because they can slow down the loading of applications that make use of character fonts.
To add them in Windows, we suggest first extracting them fromZip archive compressed then refer to the contents of the folder otf. At this point you can double-click on a font to access its preview and use the button Install up.
Alternatively, you can type font in the Windows search box and choose Font settings. The next step is to drag the file .otf of interest on the box Install via drag and drop.
Again, you can press the key combination Windows+Rto type %systemroot%\fonts in the field You open then drag the files .otf that are of interest in the window fonts di Windows.
Any program that supports the use of system fonts also displays Monaspace monospaced characters.
They are macOS you can manually drag fonts from directories fonts/otf e fonts/variable In the Font Book. A special script facilitates this process.
For use on the web, you can use files with the extension .woff e .woff2 . Usually it is sufficient to upload them, to a Web server, in the same folder containing the HTML page. A simple one style sheet allows you to set its use:
@font-face {
font-family: 'Nome-Font';
src: url('percorso/font.woff2') format('woff2'),
url('percorso/font.woff') format('woff');
font-weight: normale; /* Specificare il peso del font */
font-style: normale; /* Indicare lo stile del font (corsivo, normale,...) */
}
body {
font-family: 'Nome-Font', sans-serif;
}
