General font size and other small suggestions

[velitasali]

Hi again, and thanks for creating this font :)

I would like to make some of my issues known and suggest some changes that may improve the look of the font. I am aware that these may be considered subjective, so I will be okay if some of them (if not all) might not be implemented.

Size

Agave looks smaller on the UI compared to other fonts that came out recently. This affects how IDE presents other information, e.g., inlay hints. (I think Ubuntu Mono and Sudo also suffer from this.)

I think it would be great if the font size matched other fonts when set to appear the same size.

Size Comparison

Inlay Hints

Notice how inlay hints are almost the same size as the actual code with Agave. BTW, inlay hints are the ones that say ^OnItemViewClickedListener here.

Glyphs

Parentheses

The top and bottom edges of ( and ) look too sharp, possibly due to hinting.

I think that can be improved by changing them like this:

The original looks like this:

Ampersand

The sharp edges of ampersand gives it a bad look on smaller sizes. Either fully disconnecting or fully connecting the bottom edge should improve its look.

It can be changed like this:

The original looks like this:

Curly brackets

The same can be applied here. Too small corners are not drawn as pixels. Giving them more room may be a good idea.

Conclusion

I am not a designer but someone who tinkers with fonts a lot. Again, these are highly subjective, so if you decide to reject the idea, know that I will be okay :)

Thanks!

[blobject]

Hi, thank you very much for the feedback.

size: I will need to see if there's a general setting I can tweak, although I doubt that the letters can be made to look bigger as I've just used the standard box height of 2048 and worked within that. Sometimes, fonts seem to optimise to ASCII, and have accents/diacritics protude past the bounding box. I chose not to do that. I'll look to see if this is what Cascadia (and others) has done.

parentheses: I agree with this. Created new issue: #71

ampersand: A new design of the ampersand is being considered. I've never been too satisfied with the current design, but it was much easier to create :-P. The relevant issue is: #58

(curly) brace: Yes, I will include your note in this issue: #59

Overall, it's nice to get opinions from a user and I generally agree with your assessments. There are several design tweaks and improvements, including your suggestions here, under way, and they should all show up in the next revision. Unfortunately, I've been much too busy lately so I don't know when that will come out.

[velitasali]

Thanks for the consideration. As you said, 2048 pixels seems to be one of the conventional heights. Cascadia also uses 2048 pixels as the total height, so I am not sure what is causing the difference.

Btw, sorry about the duplicated suggestions, I should have checked for existing issues.

[blobject]

I took a glance at Cascadia's geometry. If you look at the screenshot (Cascadia left, Agave right), you will notice that the area that Cascadia allocates to descenders is shorter and they let diacritics overshoot the bounding box.

One of agave's design tenets is regularity, and I chose the dimensions accordingly. I even made squished versions of latin capitals to adhere to that regularity (As seen in the screenshot, the squished/stubbier "A" is called "Aduck"). I'm afraid getting the kind of size you want out of Agave will require an overhaul of the dimensions, which I am wary of doing, sorry. But I'll look around a bit more in case there's something else to be done.

No worries about duplicated suggestions!

[velitasali]

I see. Thanks for the explanation. I am guessing this issue can be closed since all the other suggestions have their respective threads.

Cheers.

[blobject]

I'll research the font size issue a bit more, and close this if I have no further comments/changes to make. Thanks!