The way they talk about it makes it sound like they invented the written word, but that notwithstanding the fonts actually look really nice in my opinion.
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I’d never bother changing whatever default font the editor comes with and I don’t understand why anyone would care to
No support for this yet in VSCode it seems.
Ironic. It’s as if Microsoft departments aren’t even aware of each other.
Fonts are an OS thing. If you don’t have support for it, that’s because you haven’t downloaded it yet.
So I agree with OP on the style of the press release being infuriating.
It seems like a lot of tech releases these days are written for non technical journalists (ie The Verge), “tech influencers”, and cargo cultists. They always read in a way that’s super overhyped to the point where you almost want to be dismissive of the end product as a form of protests.
However the tech seems cool. Between VSCode and GitHub we’ll be seeing a lot of feedback sooner or later.
Calling it now, Radon will become the new Comic Sans.
Yeah, I looked at the first couple of fonts, then read all that stuff about readability this, state of the art that, expressive palettes la-di-da and I thought “ok maybe they have an idea here”.
Then I looked at the rest of the examples and ran into that… thing. Like, the fucker’s so aggressively irritating to read that you could use that font to hide eg. backdoors in code, and reviewers would instinctively skip over those parts just to avoid the pain.
Honestly I could see radon for comments only. It makes it clear that it’s a comment by the font alone.
Except I like reading the comments…
Will they replace Consolas in Windows with this one or is it a GitHub-only-thing? In Consolas the characters
1andllook very similar, making the font unsuitable for coding and terminal use, so it would be good if they replaced it with something else.Anyone who makes a font where
Iland|are not immediately distinguishable should be barred from working in the industry.I hate Arial as much as a person could possibly hate a font for this exact reason.
Unfortunately this new font family still struggles with the l1 issue,in all but the last two typefaces. There’s a lot of good ideas here, and the Krypton version isn’t too bad, but I still struggle to see why they haven’t figured out that gaping issue on most of the styles here.
That was interesting how they adjusted sizes based on adjacent letters. Good idea
Very interesting technique to get the widths of the glyphs uniform without them looking ugly in most cases. OK, one can make it look bad if you know the “pain points” of the system, but in normal flowing texts, the fonts do look good.
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Having different font styles depending on the context is a really nice feature. I’ll definitely give it a try.
It’s a cool idea and the example they gave actually seemed pretty neat.
I’d (somewhat perversely) love to see this feature tried in a terminal emulator. ANSI does actually define escape codes for switching to alternative fonts (ESC [ 10 m through ESC [ 19 m) though I don’t know of any software or even term drawing library that uses it.
Kitty terminal has a lot of configurations for fonts. I beleive you can get down to adjustments for specific charecters. Idk if it uses the specific technology you are suggesting. But it is explained in the kitty.conf docs.
A lot of code editors support that without the weird “healing” features they laid out here.
VSCode has pretty decent semantic based formatting options.
I want to make a joke about how terrible the name is with just throwing in an ‘a’, but I don’t think it would be right since I’m using Fira Code.
This is pretty cool. But I’ll stick with Anonymous pro.
I didn’t think I had strong opinions on fonts.
Turns out I viscerally despise “handwriting” fonts. They’re harder to read. It just makes me recoil.
I also intensely dislike "ligatures " that turn like
==into a separate glyph. Or the one that turns>=into the > with the line under it. No. Stop. That’s not what I typed. That’s not what I’m looking for when I scan the text.Side note: I assume someone is feeling clever and is thinking of replying with a handwriting font message with ligatures. You don’t have to. I already imagined it.
The texture healing seems cool though, but I didn’t immediately notice or understand until I read through the detailed section on it.
I personally like ligatures when I’m programming. It took me some getting used to, but now I can’t live without them due to how distinct it makes the code segments. I fully understand disliking them though. Thankfully fonts like source code pro allow disabling features like ligatures and their godawful handwriting styled italics, so you’re able to use just the parts you like.
Too bad I’m married to JetBrains Mono.
I broke up with JB Mono a while ago :'(
sorry i already have comic shanns for that
Oh I’m gonna have to give that a try, thanks!
I’ve used a similar comic-mono font for a while and it was really good! I don’t like how lots of mono typefaces are angular or sharp.
That doesn’t look half bad, actually!
i use it in visual studio code and it looks really nice!
I like Hack as my font of choice, but I will probably give this a shot. It’s a font, there is no risk of data collection, Microsoft style bugs, or other Microsoft-associated product issues.
I used Dejavu Sans for like 10 years, and Hack is the perfect incremental improvement. I’ve tried to use other fonts but I keep coming back to Hack.
It’s a font, there is no risk of data collection…
TeamViewer checks for a font their app installs when visiting their website to fingerprint you.
In my web browser I personally use uBlock Origin to just block all remote fonts and browse with a JS disabled by default policy. It’s an annoying but necessary compromise, in my opinion.
Also, in Firefox v118 a new feature was introduced to curtail the font fingerprint route as well: “The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts to mitigate font fingerprinting in Private Browsing windows.”
I’m sure you know this, but for anyone else scrolling through the comments it is actually ridiculous how much data websites can query and receive to fingerprint users from the web browser. Just look at https://amiunique.org – “WHY IS THIS ALLOWED?” is the question I have asked for many years now.
“WHY IS THIS ALLOWED?” is the question I have asked for many years now.
Because people want to have features in their web browsers and originally no one really designed the web with security in mind.
Some of it is incredibly difficult to imagine how to do in a private way, too.
For example, my browser can display AVIF images. If my browser announces in the Accept “hey, I’m able to display AVIF images. Please send me AVIF images if you have them rather than JPEG”, that helps to identify me, since most browser don’t display AVIF, which sucks. But I really want to get AVIF images: they’re efficient. So how do I announce that I want AVIF images without announcing that I want AVIF images?
Some of the other web features were well-intentioned but have just ended up being useless. Like your browser also announces what language you prefer. Like “hey if you a German version of this text, please send it to me in German, thanks”. But for some reason EVERY WEBSITE IGNORES THIS and just says “oh you speak Spanish and English but you’re travelling in Russian right now? HOPE YOU LIKE READING RUSSIAN FUCKER”. So it’s 100% only used for invading privacy now.
Some of the tracking mechanisms never should have been allowed in the first place (like timezone and which fonts I have installed), but some of them (like Accept) I can’t think of how to do in a secure way.
Fuck me sideways.
Also, I’d remove battery charge metric from the fingerprint. Since it changes over time, I wouldn’t really consider it a good or even usable metric.
Could be used in combination with other metrics to identify a specific user’s movements through a site over time, if the other metrics aren’t unique enough.
Possibly, but when you have time as a realiable metric already, you dont need another metric that ticks down at an unknown and inconsistent speed, and goes up once in a while. Hell, I keep my laptop plugged 99% of the time.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/91347/how-can-a-font-be-used-for-privilege-escalation
Not a serious rebuttal. But yes, MS has found a way for Windows to be vulnerable to attacks using fonts.
What the…
I meant to link the CVE sorry. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2011-3402
