Kerning underscore 'k'

[nandoconde]

Hi!

Is it me, or the kerning for the underscore is a bit smaller on the left side?

ₐᵢₙₖₜᵣ

Julia v1.7.1 Windows Terminal 10

Windows Notepad

Thanks!

[cormullion]

Hi! I see what you mean! There's no kerning, of course, in a monospaced font in text editors, but I can see that it would be nice to shift the "ₖ" to the right a bit, when followed by a "ₜ".

To be honest, I think monospaced fonts are always going to look ugly in certain combinations, and better in others. For example, here:

the "ₖ" followed by "ᵣ" looks somehow right, or at least less ugly. And if you moved the "ₖ" to the right, to look good followed by an "ₜ", it would look less good.

I'll see if I can find a good compromise for these. It would be nice to have a full set of subscripts to play with though! :)

[nandoconde]

Hi!

I see what you mean too. It seems difficult to find the right balance. Maybe it can be done programmatically based on some weighting algorithm, but that seems difficult too.

Too bad about the subscript, but Unicode still sucks there :(

(About the kerning, yeah, I know that it is a mono spaced font, but I don't know the correct lingo for that hahaha).

[github-actions]

This issue has been open for 30 days with no activity.

[singularitti]

There's a series of font called "Monaspace" developed by GitHub that tries to fix that. It's called "texture healing". It does not support subscripts yet (See this issue), but I think in the future it will. It's an interesting idea to know some people are working on this.

[cormullion]

I tried out Monaspace for a while when it first came out. I couldn't decide whether the better spacing you might get on a single line compensated for the uneven appearance you might get between lines. Here, each line is better, on its own, but together they're more obviously inconsistent:

Which is worse - bad kerning or inconsistent characters?

I do like the idea in theory, but in practice it could be a lot of work. I might experiment with a few some time to see...

[singularitti]

I see what you mean, hope they can think of something smart to deal with it...