After working with SomeType Mono for a little while, I decided to quantify my font ratings.

I started by dusting off my old fontforge svg2ttf script, since I knew its Python API exposed everything I needed. Then I discovered that I can’t get that API to work any more. Somewhere between the Python 2->3 updates and Homebrew’s descent into madness, it done broke.

I know how to extract metrics and outlines using Font::FreeType and Cairo in Perl, and most of what I need is already exposed in my PDF::Cairo module, but I’d have had to do some mucking about with internals to get it all, and it would have added a messy dependency should I decide to share the script.

So I switched to Adobe Font Toolkit, which cleanly installs into a Python virtualenv without any issues. Its tx utility can both extract metadata and calculate precise bounding boxes for every glyph, which allows me to measure many of my concerns:

FONT OfficeCodePro-Regular.otf
x-height 69.012% of ascender height
relative width 100.000%
vertical centering offset from '=':
! greater -3.79%
! less -3.79%
! parenleft -7.04%
! parenright -7.04%
! bracketleft -7.04%
! bracketright -7.04%
! braceleft -7.04%
! braceright -7.04%
! bar -10.83%
width compared to '=':
! asciitilde +4.19%

This tells me that Office Code Pro has a standard typewriter width (Courier, Prestige Elite, etc), a decent x-height, equal widths for -=+, a slightly-wide ~, common vertical centering for =-+~*&#%/\ and digits, a very small vertical offset for <>, a bigger one for ()[]{}, and an annoyingly large one for |. Since I’m not analyzing the glyph outlines yet, I can’t tell that it has a five-lobed asterisk and a slashed zero.

For comparison, here’s the latest release of Iosevka Fixed SS02 Regular:

FONT iosevka-fixed-ss02-regular.ttf
x-height 69.829% of ascender height
relative width 83.333%
vertical centering offset from '=':
! asciitilde -2.11%
! ampersand +3.62%
! percent +3.62%
! zero +3.62%
! X +3.62%
width compared to '=':
! asciitilde +19.47%

Similar x-height, much narrower, &% aligned with caps/numerals, and twiddle a hair low and extra-wide.

The last time I looked at Iosevka, all the “SSnn” variants were built with the same family name, so you couldn’t tell which of the sixteen variations you’d downloaded except by the file name. They’ve cleaned things up quite a bit, and now it’s fully scriptable so you can roll your own variation and Have It Your Way. The downside is that the repo is over 5 gigabytes. The other downside is that it uses npm.

Other fonts I’ve tried recently? IBM Plex Mono (painfully short hyphen, dotted zero, goofy #), Cascadia Mono (the dotted zero and goofy alphabet clobber its otherwise perfect score, although I’d use Light rather than Regular), Go Mono (five-lobed goofy asterisk, serifs, and inconsistent punctuation weight), JetBrains Mono NL (dotted zero, five-lobed asterisk, small-but-consistent vertical offsets for ()[]{}/\|~*), and Code Saver (short hyphen, high /\, low |).

Oh, and the name of my script? Termanal. If I ever roll my own custom font, obviously I’ll call it Termanal Regular. 😁

Update

Just found the current much-expanded version of the Inconsolata family. Slashed zero, ligatures off by default, five-lobed asterisk, annoyingly short hyphen, slightly-low [], annoyingly low |, eight weights, and nine widths (166%, 125%, 100%, 92%, 83%, 75%, 67%, 58%, and 42% for when you need all the columns).

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