I’m finding an Electra at Linotype (designed in 1935 by the fabulously named William Addison Dwiggins), but it’s neither mono nor sans. Who makes the Electra you speak of?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but it seems to be a good font that works well with the limitations of the system it was used on (in my mind, monochrome Macs). Clear. Easy to read. Everything you’d want in a UI font, really. I liked Lucida Grande for similar reasons, even though I wouldn’t write a paper in it.
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Exactly! I was responding to Matthew’s topic of this thread: is there any new ground in the mono-space world that has not been explored. In a long-winded way, I was suggesting an Electra inspired font. (call it Electro or something clever…)
The original Chicago font was designed by Susan Kare. I wouldn’t want to use it on today’s 4K display. But for the machines it was designed for, it was perfect. OTOH my favorite era of Apple design is pre–1992, when it was more mischievous and assertive.
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Monaspace Neon is an interesting sans-serif monspaced font.
Lettermatic has released a super family of monospaced typefaces in variable font format (and in otf fonts with 7 weights and three widths): Monaspace, with five typefaces, i.e.:
- Xenon is (tapered) slab serif. Its \c and \e look slab-serif.
- Argon is a “humanist sans” (with some sans serif and some slab serif characteristics).
- Neon is a “neo-grotesque” sans.
- Radon has a “handwriting” style.
- Krypton is a “mechanical sans”.
Monaspace features “texture healing”, which borrows space from \i to expand any neighboring \m or \w, for example.
There are 8 stylistic sets, each implementing programming ligatures.
The Monaspace typefaces were sponsored by Github Next, which may interest MB.
Monaspace Krypton looks like the novel one of the bunch, but out of the five Monaspace variants it’s the least my-cup-of-tea.
Further, I’m not sure there’d be anything that is my cup of tea in this space, but I’d be quite happy to be proven wrong:
GitHub/Microsoft’s suggestion that this could be used for Copilot-generated suggestions isn’t the worst idea for something like this, although Visual Studio Code doesn’t have a way to do this yet.
The Monaspace typefaces lack Cyrillic and Greek.
For a Latin, Greek, & Cyrillic SIL-OFL monospaced typeface, I mention Iosevka, which has distinctive glyphs in the LGC scripts. Slab-serif code contrast nicely with the roman text (while sans serif fonts are used for programming languages, in some statistics publications). I want a slab serif for presenting code (especially if it contains a Greek or Cyrillic glyph), while for programming I would prefer just a hint of slab serif, such as one entering serif on the m and one leaving serif, with nothing blocking the counters.
Iosevka’s designer used to be based in China or Japan, and he wanted a programming typeface supplementing CJK typefaces, which are often monospaced. He designed the default glyphs to be narrow, for compatibility with CJK fonts. Consequently, Iosevka is roughly as narrow as a serif font. Such narrowness appeals to some programmers, as noted above.
Iosevka also comes in about 20 different variants, often named in homage of a good monospaced font, e.g., IBM Plex Mono, besides its slab-serif variant. For such “stylistic sets” (nonstandard usage), Iosevka has an expanded version, which is roughly the width of typical monospaced Latin-script typefaces. It also provides a lot of formats. Also it has 100 character variants!
He asked for feedback at Typedrawers, years ago. He is a computer scientist, and his workflow may interest MB and others even more than his typeface.