Any plan to create compressed/condensed or thin styles?

[c02y]

I enjoy PragmataPro, which is relatively thin, so if you can create compressed/condensed styles for it, I would appreciate that.

[chrissimpkins]

Do you mean thinner strokes or narrower horizontal spacing between the characters?

[c02y]

I don't exactly understand the meaning of your expression.

You don't have to change anything, just make the width smaller or height bigger, you can google "compressed/condensed font " for images of those kinds of fonts, many fonts consist of regular, italic, bold, compressed/condensed, and maybe even more complicated font styles combined of those basic styles.

[chrissimpkins]

Interested to know if you want the individual glyph shapes to appear narrower (i.e. finer like a thin style font) or if you want narrower spacing between glyphs so that they appear closer together (a condensed set).

[c02y]

When you already made characters narrower, if you don't make them closer, the big space between characters would make your code/text extremely ugly.

[chrissimpkins]

There are no immediate plans to support a thin set. Let's leave this open and see if we can attack it down the road.

[c02y]

The space between characters of compressed/condensed could just be the same as the regular style, no need to be smaller than regular.

[davidcelis]

Hey @chrissimpkins, I was about to open an issue with this same request. I think what @c02y is trying to say is just that it would be nice to have a set with thinner strokes. For example, I currently use Source Code Pro and prefer to go all the way to ExtraLight. I love the look of Hack but I've gotten so used to a thin stroke that it seems bold to me 😉

I'm not a font designer so I could be totally wrong, but it doesn't appear that a thin set would require any sort of spacing changes. It should be similar to creating a bold set but on the other end of the spectrum.

[chrissimpkins]

Thanks @davidcelis and @c02y. I understand. Let me look into whether there is a reasonably straightforward interpolation approach that we could use. Unfortunately this isn't (/may not be) a simple request and may require a manual draw of an entirely new set.

[sjrmanning]

I believe @c02y is actually after a condensed version, whereas @davidcelis is after a set with, like he said thinner strokes. I would like to +1 for thinner strokes — especially on retina displays I find light variants are much nicer to read.

[chrissimpkins]

@sjrmanning noted. thank you very much

[chrissimpkins]

Have been looking into this in more detail over the last week. I think that this may be possible. Will update here.

[c02y]

Thank you. I'm looking forward to it.

[anna-is-cute]

I was also looking to move from Source Code Pro, which is what I use everywhere. Using Hack is nice in my IDE, but I prefer a lighter font weight for terminals and IRC. I would love to see this, since then I could use Hack everywhere!

[chrissimpkins]

@jkcclemens Thanks Kyle. We are working on improvements to the current sets over the next several releases and then will revisit this, if even to begin a smaller character set release and build simultaneously from there. Will post here when we have something for you.

[mdkcore0]

Hey, +1 for the condensed/compressed set (like PragmataPro or Input Mono Compessed) ;)

Also, nice work on Hack!

[chrissimpkins]

@rodrigogolive thanks for your feedback! This is something that we will definitely consider down the road. We are in the process of implementing a significant change in our build tool chain and have a number of planned changes in the current sets. Once things settle out with these primary areas of focus we will definitely revisit this issue.

[c02y]

PragmataPro and Input Mono Compessed are my only fonts for my Emacs after testing a lot of fonts.

On November 28, 2015 12:15:18 AM GMT+08:00, Rodrigo Oliveira notifications@github.com wrote:

Hey, +1 for the condensed/compressed set (like PragmataPro or Input
Mono Compessed) ;)

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#48 (comment)

[chrissimpkins]

Will the two of you push some screenshots so that we can see what you are seeing (and want)

[davidcelis]

Sure thing, @chrissimpkins. Here's what a normal weight font (Source Code Pro, for example) would look like:

And here's what Source Code Pro looks like when set to Extra Light (which is what I personally use):

[chrissimpkins]

@davidcelis Thank you David!

[davidcelis]

No problem! There are more examples of weight differences here, from 200 to 900 in increments of 100: https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Source+Code+Pro

[c02y]

Thanks for the snapshots, but I'm afraid I'm have to tell your that these are not what I'm talking about at all, these are just normal and light fonts, not compressed/condensed, I have no access to my personal computer right now, I'll post them here tomorrow.

-------- 原始邮件 --------
发件人：David Celis notifications@github.com
时间：周六 11月28日 08:03
收件人：chrissimpkins/Hack Hack@noreply.github.com
抄送：c02y cody.chan.cz@gmail.com
主题：Re: [Hack] Any plan to create thin styles? (#48)

Sure thing, @chrissimpkins. Here's what a normal weight font (Source Code Pro, for example) would look like:

And here's what Source Code Pro looks like when set to Extra Light (which is what I personally use):

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#48 (comment)

[mdkcore0]

Hey @chrissimpkins, I'm adding some screenshots of my environment, all of them using the same settings for the fonts (the code snippet is from the live preview of Input):

PragmataPro:

Input (on their site there are a configurator that helps to mimic the feel of other fonts):

Hack:

I like Hack, it's pretty nice to use, but when developing (~80% of my time in front of a computer), I miss the condensed style of the other fonts.

[chrissimpkins]

@rodrigogolive thank you very much! This is very helpful to see how tight things are in your working fonts.

Are you generally in a small terminal window rather than a full screen editor? Is the intent more glyphs per width or is it the appearance that you prefer?

[mdkcore0]

You're welcome @chrissimpkins! i am used to have a full screen terminal (generally 1920x1080), running a terminal multiplexer (tmux), so I can quickly run/edit/navigate on them. Here are two new screenshots at this resolution, with a current project so you can see the differences (just resized a little, as the intent is to show the difference of the font on screen).

Hack (attention on the top panel, vim vertical splits):

PragmataPro (same environment, with this style of font I can have an additional vim split):

When developing, I prefer to have more glyphs per width, but I'm OK with the appearance on other tasks. But, as I'm developing at the most of the time, a compressed/thin style is better for me ;)

[chrissimpkins]

Got it. Thank you very much!

[c02y]

@rodrigogolive These are my screenshots in my Emacs, a little difference from yours, I think it is caused by your teminal:

PragmataPro

---

Input Mono Compressed

---

Hack

---

Oh GOD, these three pics took me several hours to upload to Github, always says file type not supported, but they are just jpeg or png.

[chrissimpkins]

@c02y wow, you really do like it tightly set. Just to confirm, these are all at the same font size? The glyphs look larger for Hack. This may be an x-height difference or just a visual distortion based upon the narrower glyph widths in the condensed fonts you are showing.

[chrissimpkins]

@c02y and I'll ask the same question, are you trying to achieve more glyphs per width or you simply have a preference for this appearance in your text?

[chrissimpkins]

And final question for the day... how does Hack look to you if you take the font size down a few pixels? There will be a point where you will achieve the same character / width threshold. With the large counters and x-height on these glyphs you can get away with pretty small font sizes in many cases (platform/display/renderer dependent). The sacrifice will be in the height of the glyphs, but they may actually be more clear because of the wider relative fixed width than in the condensed fonts. I see issues with the glyphs like the wand m in those condensed font screenshots. These are notoriously problematic in fixed width fonts because they need space between the strokes to display well on the screen.

[c02y]

@chrissimpkins

The fonts in my three screenshots are all the same size(14), I was using (If you know how to use Emacs)

(set-frame-font "PragmataPro-14" t t)
(set-frame-font "Input Mono Compressed-14" t t)
(set-frame-font "Hack-14" t t)

to change the font temporarily and then take the screenshots, I didn't change anything but the font name and font size, and yes, the Hack-14 is lager than "PragmataPro-14" and "Input Mono Compressed-14".

You can simply think that all I need is more glyphs per width.

That (14) is the best font size both for my eyes and in my screen, so if I make the Hack font smaller, it may be not friendly to my eyes, and I still like the ProgmataPro and Input Mono Compressed way, I mean more glyphs per width.

[chrissimpkins]

Got it, thanks!

[anna-is-cute]

There are still those of us who want thin styles, which are not compressed styles. Feels like compressed styles should be in a compressed styles issue, and thin styles should be in the thin styles issue. However, it would be nice to have compressed styles and thin styles.

[chrissimpkins]

@jkcclemens Thanks Kyle. The condensed variants will require a full redesign of the glyphs. This is a big project across the 1500+ glyphs x 4 variants that we release. The thin styles will be more straightforward but will still require a significant amount of work. Both of these are likely to be medium to long term projects for us as we still have a great deal of work to improve the current sets before we are prepared to tackle either of these projects with the size of our development team at the moment. I see these as derivatives that start as ASCII sets and expand in the breadth of character set support from there.

If we can attract more typeface developers who would like to participate in the project or someone takes an interest in creating their own fork to generate a derivative along these lines, these would be perfect areas to tackle sooner rather than later.

[c02y]

@jkcclemens Thanks, already changed the issue title to compressed/condensed.

[davidcelis]

Should we open a separate issue for thin styles?

[c02y]

@davidcelis Unnecessary, I changed the issue title to contains both compressed/condensed and thin since there are already conversations about thin font in here.

[oryband]

Hi. Any update?

[chrissimpkins]

Nothing in the works at the moment. Remains on the to do list.

[oryband]

PING! How about now?

[mistadikay]

Would love to see Hack Light! It's the only reason why I won't consider it over Hasklig Light which I currently use

[chrissimpkins]

@oryband @mistadikay

We need some type designers to help with these draws to support them on our end. The lead author crew here is very slim in number and our project goals/time demands elsewhere (in and outside of the project) have not permitted this to date. Would love to make all of these things happen but a complete re-draw to achieve this is an enormous effort. To date, no one with an interest has come forward to do this.

For those who are interested in these new variants, I would encourage you to grab a FLOSS font editor (e.g. TruFont, FontForge) and get to work drawing from the new UFO source! We highly encourage and support forks. Upcoming changes are very much intended to support this to a much greater extent and we are happy to help get derivative projects off the ground in any way that we can.

Few updates on our recent changes that apply here. As of v3.0 we will be modifying the license to remove the reserved font name so that anyone who designs any derivative / fork of Hack can use Hack in the name. In addition, our new automated build tool chain (all FLOSS tools, fully scripted) that is coming as of v3.0 should make everything outside of the design itself (including desktop builds, automated hinting, and web font builds of woff + woff2 files) very simple to maintain in derivative projects. The build tools are currently under review by the Debian and Fedora projects so that anyone who forks and builds new things with the build tooling here can release on these platforms that build fonts from source under free software guidelines.

[mkleehammer]

Ping?

[chrissimpkins]

No plans to do this work myself. If someone out there wants to draw them we would be more than willing to support it and I would personally be willing to help however I can. It is going to take someone with the type design skills and a lot of free time on their hands... This is a very time intensive request.