- I'm more of a bitmap font guy (at least, as long as my eyes continue to forgive me for it) but I'm always interested to see what other fonts there are around. It does look quite nice.
I must admit when I ran across the second real paragraph from the main page, I couldn't help but only think more and more about how we will look back on marketing copy like this in a decade from now:
AI assistants produce both code and prose. MonoLisa Text renders long-form explanations with optimal readability, while MonoLisa Code keeps your code crystal clear. The perfect pairing for the AI era. (Under the title "A perfect pairing for the AI era.")
Ignoring the deep pit of sadness I felt when thinking about the incredibly long (and revolutionary) history of typefaces that led us to today for just a moment, I'm honestly curious how effective this marketing is. How many people would assume a font would be suitable for general text but not LLM-generated text and would need to be dissuaded from that notion? I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting" (but I'm too scared to look at this stage).
- $149 for a font for personal computer use is kind of steep! I would pay $20 for this, but the value has to be pretty high to pay $149 when there's a huge selection of free fonts on nerdfonts.com, of which many are pretty great. Like what does this font really offer that makes it so pricey?
by microflash
3 subcomments
- Looks interesting.
> The Licensee may not modify, translate, adapt, alter, decompile, disassemble, decrypt, reverse engineer, change or alter the embedding bits, the font name, legal notices contained in the font software, nor seek to discover the source code of the font data, convert into another font format, create bitmaps, add or subtract any glyphs, symbols or accents, or any other derivative works based on the electronic data in this product.
This is why I haven’t bought it. I like to subset fonts to reduce the size. Any font license that prohibits this just gets ignored by me, no matter how good it is.
- > MonoLisa ships as a variable font with two axes. Weight gives you every cut from Thin to Black in a single file — no megabytes per style. Grade fine-tunes typographic color by adjusting stroke thickness without changing glyph widths
If any web page designer reads this, weight 1 and grade -50 is what many web pages look like, or even thinner than that. Weight 300 and grade 0 are the lower boundary of readability IMO.
A free (as money) font with most of those properties is Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, both monospace and variable width. https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
- Looks decent but $250 AUD for a font? Even for local and personal use? That's... a lot. I was thinking if it is paid and it was around $25 I'd consider it, then I saw the price!
by holografix
1 subcomments
- Classic marketing pricing strategy. Suddenly what has been seen as cheap is now given airs of luxury, exclusivity and craftsmanship.
If you are really serious about your work… and you are, aren’t you? Then $150 is nothing, it’s a reflection on how serious you are. An artist needs great tools… etc etc
- Seems there's no way to disable the <= ligature without disabling whitespace ligatures? I'm not all too crazy for real ligatures but whitespace adjustments otherwise seem nice.
Also, as it's so finely adjustable, would love if they'd offer some variants for dot and comma, to increase their size, because that's my number one problem with fonts since age 45.
- I call all these new fonts monofonts, mono in the sense of monoculture. Aesthetics practically indistinguishable from each other. Give me one of the IBM Selectric fonts in a modern form and I'll be happy as a clam.
- Similar to Input Mono font, which is superior to Monolisa in pretty much any way I can think of, plus free. https://input.djr.com/
- Font claims to support Bulgarian Cyrillic but in fact supports the Russian one, which is different and very often overlooked as the same by font designers.
- Regarding coding, the characters “:={” are all vertically centered differently.
by gregrobson
0 subcomment
- Bought MonoLisa back in 2022, never even considered switching coding typeface since. Before that time I used to switch every 3-6 months.
It's really well balanced easy on the eye.
- Looks good. Won't ever buy a font though.
by roundcan7998
2 subcomments
- Created an account, to come tell you folk, just how much I love Monolisa.
Have been using it every since they launched, in both my terminal, and my code editors.
It’s lovely!
editing to add:
They even have PPP pricing! Which as someone living in India, I highly appreciate, since it puts a lovely piece of art within reach.
- To everbody complaining about the huge price of $149. For a font pricing thats pretty normal.
Maybe coders aren't the usual targeting group but print media is paying plenty of cash for typo licenses.
- I got so used to how narrow Iosevka is that I think I'd find it challenging to find a replacement at this point. Any other typefaces that are on the narrower side?
by microtonal
0 subcomment
- I have used MonoLisa for a few years now as my terminal and editor font and I absolutely love it. It was a fair bit cheaper when I bought it (80 Euro IIRC), but was well-worth it!
- Umm... Who would pay $149 to use a font? Maybe I'm not enough of a typography nerd, but I find the free choices (JetBrains Mono, Iosevka, Fira Code, ...) quite enough.
- That c is opinionated. Either one likes it or explicitly doesn't. I doubt there's an in-between.
- The Sans versions has Signika vibes, I like it, but the price was enough of a showstopper for me.
- Title: "a typeface for developers"
> and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover other use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.
Dumb question, when should a developer not use a monospaced font? I.e. when should they use MonaLisa Text
I'm sure I'm missing the obvious, but it is purely for LLM output use cases as the website implies (in which case why isn't Claude approach of using a serif font a better strategy).
Please don't take my comments are negative. Just genuinely curious, which is why I'm asking.
- The "code" version:
Capital "i" has crossbars? CHECK
Zero is distinguishable from O? CHECK
"Text" version: Capital "i" has crossbars? NOPE, so no dice.
I hate fonts that don't have a properly-formed capital "i".
by melody_calling
0 subcomment
- I adore MonoLisa, thank you for all the effort that's gone into making it and congratulations on the new release!
- I can't figure this out from the website, does the text variant have tabular figures?
- I love this font. I think it is probably the only coding font I have ever actually purchased.
by ranger_danger
0 subcomment
- You can download the web version for free here:
https://github.com/braver/programmingfonts/tree/gh-pages/fon...
There's probably a way to convert those to TTF or something else if you need it.
by steinvakt2
2 subcomments
- Is it possible to get this for free? I know there’s a free option but I don’t understand what the limits are
by SpyCoder77
0 subcomment
- Absolutely amazing name.
- In a world where Fira Code, Hack, JetBrains Mono, and like a zillion others (of equal, if not greater, quality) are offered for free, this is obviously a pure marketing play and it's sad we live in a world where even fucking fonts are so heavily monetized.
- I mean, it's a nice font but that's a bit steep. The site thinks I'm from Mongolia for whatever reason, I don't even have a VPN on atm.
- Look nice but super expensive for the normal developer. Good luck with the monetization, hope you get some company customers.
by pentacrypt
0 subcomment
- Looks lovely!
- [dead]
by sealedmailuk
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- [dead]
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