
Five weights monospaced typeface for the benefit of charities - peterlind
http://almamono.com
======
nnq
_Really_ bad for _code_ though...

\- the difference between uppercase and lowercase is too low making camelCase
very hard to read

\- the colon is aligned to the left of its space making ":=" look horrible

\- "$" is hard to distinguish from "S"

\- [] have funny vertical alignment

\- every char is a bit wider than it should, wasting a lot of horizontal
screen estate - what you want to avoid when working with 3+ columns of code on
one screen

Bad compared even to Ubuntu Mono. Very bad compared to Source Code Pro.
Horrible compared to Consolas.

But looks good on titles of articles referencing charity :) Seems like the
intended use for a monospace font... right?

~~~
plgs
And ^ results in a blank character.

~~~
dafeld
That's strange! I'll take a look, I know I designed that character! Thanks for
the heads up!

------
floatrock
It's disturbing that the landing page does not mention at all what charity
procedes go to. You need to go to the very bottom of the About page to finally
find it's for [http://www.unhcr.org](http://www.unhcr.org)

The donation is also done in a sketchy way. Also near the bottom of the About
page:

> How does this charity thing work?

> So far I'm using a solution that means I get payments sent to me to my
> Paypal and I personally make the donations to charities. I've chosen this
> way because it's easy.

In other words, you're paypal'ing money to a stranger and hope that the money
makes it's way to charity

To the author's defense, he does have a "Are you to be trusted?" section that
acknowledges this. The idea of a pay-what-you-like-for-charity-on-my-side-
project idea is neat, but you need some degree of credibility or third-party
to make it work. The next side project should be integrating against something
that guarantees the promise of the donations.

~~~
dafeld
It's a leap of faith, most definitely, and maybe a bit shady when viewed from
an outsiders perspective. Just give money to a stranger? Yes. Shady indeed, I
agree.

But then again, if you chose to pay for it, which is your choice - you could
download it for free - you actually get a font in five weights that has taken
me a lot of time to craft.

It's your choice. But you can trust me. It's the Internet - people wouldn't
lie on the internet, no?

And - I'll be the first to agree that this project needs more credibility
and/or third-party involvement. I've already gotten the ball rolling on some
partnerships with third parties for the future. Getting Hacker News'd wasn't
even on my horizon. Superexciting! I was expecting friends and family to
support this, like on my other design/charity project that I mention and link
to on the about page.

------
kazinator
Microsoft Windows ships with a very nice font called Consolas. It is fantastic
for programming.

I use it everywhere, including Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu, usually in an 11
point size.

I settled on this font while trying numerous monospaced fonts: everything I
could get my hands on. Boy was I surprised at how I overlooked Consolas.

------
unwind
That's an interesting license, and very nice of course.

I got a bit confused, my initial reading and interpretation was that the
intent is to have the actual font used in charity and relief efforts, I guess
in signage. That's probably not what the author meant, though.

~~~
dreamsofdragons
It doesn't appear so, but that would be a great 3rd option. Send in your
charity registration, and get a free licence to use the font in your charities
branding. That could serve to both help charities and build more awareness
around the font, creating more sales, and more proceeds. You should mention it
to them.

------
JdeBP
I read. I went elsewhere. Here's why.

The pages do not tell me what I would be paying for. For me, it's important to
know what font file format is used, because I need to know what and how many
hoops I would have to jump through in order to obtain vt fonts. (Best outcome
is two vt fonts: one normal+bold, one light+demibold. This is why the multiple
weights interested me in the first place.)

* [https://freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt](https://freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt)

* [https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons#Font_Support](https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons#Font_Support)

There's also no information about the character repertoire. Does it have
everything in the WGL4? Or the W1G? Or less than either? What _does_ it have?

------
z3t4
If any font maker read this. I would like to have a "bitmap" monospace font as
a true type font in the same size as Consolas 15px. With "bitmap" I mean high
contrast super crisp, pixel perfect, that don't lose contrast without sub-
pixel-antailias.

~~~
a_e_k
Crispness was one of my primary motivations for learning to make my own
programming font, Luculent [1][2]. Consolas is wider so the proportions aren't
quite the same. But mine is superhinted to look good with no or limited
antialiasing at 15 ppem, among other sizes.

[1] [http://eastfarthing.com/luculent](http://eastfarthing.com/luculent) [2]
[https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent](https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent)

~~~
z3t4
It looks good on many sizes with anti-alias turned off. But with anti-alias
it's very thin and the contrast is bad.

------
tehrei
Really nice and clean. Would prefer it if it included cyrillic characters and
more latin ones to cover all European languages (e.g. Polish ł is missing,
Czech š, č and probably several Hungarian letters).

------
mattdennewitz
spoiler: [http://www.unhcr.org/](http://www.unhcr.org/) is the charity to whom
the author intends to donate contributions.

------
ChicagoDave
Well-intentioned, but needs work, especially from a coding perspective.

~~~
dafeld
I totally agree to that! Never really thought this educational experiment
would be featured on HN. It has kinda blown up! I'm glad you took a gander
though!

------
DrTung
Good news: the purchasing process works fine.

Bad news: you cannot download the font (the supplied URL, when clicked, first
goes to gumroad.com then to cloudfront.net which gives the error: Safari
cannot open the page).

------
27182818284
About page throws up a big scary phishing warning in Google Chrome.

~~~
dafeld
No, really? Shit. The only fish I want is Swedish fish. I need to investigate
that, can't really see what that would be...

~~~
hullo
I also don't see the warning. Toss your domains into Google webmaster central
if you haven't, it'll give you info if it actually arises (and is just
generally a good practice.)

~~~
dafeld
Thanks, I'll do that right away!

I use Jekyll that generates a static html site. The only third party stuff I
have on that page is a MailChimp-widget. So, I'll wait and see what Google
webmaster tools will tell me.

------
dkuntz2
There appears to be no carrot (^) character for the font

~~~
jahewson
I assume you mean _caret_ instead of a vegetable.

