(https://intactile.com/projets/ameliorer-la-lisibilite-et-la-...)

Short words like “in” and “all” end up looking like they’ve got completely different tracking, which in turn makes it harder to see word boundaries.

Probably a high-DPI screen in a well-lit room is simply the wrong environment to judge this font though, since it’s designed for low-DPI screens in a cockpit. But if you’re planning to use it outside of that environment, do test against other options.

If you're designing a font not just for legibility, but primarily for safety, then it seems extremely important that each glyph is uniquely distinguishable from other glyphs. Although this font has different characters for 1/I/l, at a quick glance an uppercase i could still be confused with a pipe (|), and 0 (zero) and O (capital o).[1] I'm sure there are more. So from that standpoint, this font fails for me for legibility/safety.

Also a nitpick, but assuming Chrome is using 60pt B612 font for the title (../fonts/B612-Regular.woff), the "B/6/1" glyphs are hideously formed (that "1" puke) and make me doubt the rest of the character set.

[1] e.g., the FAA has already addressed this with tail numbers: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certifica...

It was probably optimized for low-res screens and specifically for monospace usage.

Kerning looks quite off in the Google fonts specimen (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/B612?query=b612)

Bunch of previous discussion here from 2019:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601

The main reason is that I need to use a syntax to represent a music sequencer such as ___65. B612 can separate two or more underscores perfectly.

For a long time, it's always my first choice of coding font although I have no idea on its origin. I just feel it looks great when I browse all Google fonts. But it's great to know the story behind it, and thanks for sharing.

In my browser, I always use my own font choices (Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced… → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above), which makes me more sensitive to certain sorts of modifications: most significantly, I observe how unreasonably common it is for pages to change the whole document’s letter-spacing, normally to a positive value. (My firm opinion: you should absolutely never do this as a global thing, no exceptions.) I’m not certain if it might make more sense with some fonts than others, but the main thing is that I notice it.

So then, with this font, the main thing that immediately stood out to me is how wide its tracking is, so that I’d almost feel justified in adding `letter-spacing: -0.03em` (except that the shapes and some kerning pairs don’t work that way). Does it feel that way to others? And is there some kind of general trend in the direction of adding more space between letters?

(The font’s bold face, on the other hand, feels a mite cramped when in proximity to the regular weight, since it uses the same metrics. Also certain pairs are kerned much more tightly so that they feel out of place to me, e.g. Vi, DG (especially in bold). And as for the parentheses, I had to check that no, they hadn’t inserted a thin space inside the parentheses, the font really is just that weird.)

Such a tiresome defect in one font after another.

    abc::xyz

    some_expression
        .method()
        .method();

I would assume in cockpit it's better to always use slashed version to avoid confusion.

There's a lot of distracting glitches like the K and Q having small gaps where strokes come together, and even glyphs like the N, M, Y and Z have weird little gaps at the joints, the F and B have a bizarre overhang at the upper horizontal stroke, the 1 and 6 have a weird cut in their strokes.

There are lots of weird confusing choices like the parenthesis being a round rect instead of a bow shape, the @ having a "complex a" inside, the 3 and 5 using a "cute" diagonal layout instead of the normal "rounded-and-rect layout".

Seems horrible for something that should be as simple as possible. The default system UI fonts like DejaVu Sans, Segoe UI, Roboto, etc. are far better.

BTW, I'm used to FontForge (which is not the most amenable to collaborative work) and would love to know what other font designers use and what would be a good collaborative workflow for open source fonts.

Example: https://www.dafontfree.net/data/41/m/94730/map/0-charmap-m-1...