Suggestion on disambiguating between 1 and lowercase L

[boonyasukd]

The font has been almost perfect for me, except for the lowercase L and 1, which IMO are quite similar with one another.

It'd be great if the tail of the lowercase L is the same as lowercase t (i.e., tail pointing to the right). That way, the look-and-feel is retained, while characters become more distinguishable.

[BoldMonday]

This is out of the question I'm afraid. It would change the width of the character and therefore might cause text reflow for existing users.

[boonyasukd]

@BoldMonday Let me clarify, since what you said is an incorrect interpretation of what I'm asking for.

I'm not talking about making the tail of both characters being of the same length. It's more about them having the same style. The suggestion I made will not tamper with the character width, so the character width will remain the same. Some other monospace has also used this style, and I believe Plex Mono can benefit from this as well, hence the suggestion.

What I'm asking for is along the line of this:

As you can see from the screenshot, even if the style of the tail has changed, the width of character remains the same, since the "head" of character "l" at the top will still take up horizontal space on the left of the character despite the change in tail style. So, I fail to see how my suggestion will ever affect character width.

[BoldMonday]

You did not clarify what subfamily of Plex you were referring to. I assumed it was Plex Sans, not Plex Mono.

Changing the design in Plex Mono is also out of the question I'm afraid. We're not going to change base characters that have been part of the character set for years already. That ship has sailed.

[boonyasukd]

I realize just now that this repo isn't specific to the monospace version. I should have been more specific. I apologize for that.

I also understand that making a total style switch wouldn't be practical. But would adding an alternative style in OpenType be impossible as well? I believe there's an OpenType feature called character variant that is suitable for this purpose. In recent years, IDEs and Terminal emulators have started to support this, and newer fonts (like Jetbrains Mono or Cascadia Code) also make use of it. I think providing stylistic choice(s) for improved legibility would be great.