Request to consider making the calligraphic and the Fraktur glyphs to be unmodulated/sans-serif

[apoorvpotnis]

This is a request to consider making the calligraphic and the Fraktur glyphs to be unmodulated/sans-serif. The current glyphs are modulated and are more suited for serif fonts, and all the other glyphs of Julia Mono are sans serif or unmodulated. Some inspiration can be drawn from the Wolfram Mathematica fonts.

MathematicaMono.pdf
MathematicaMono-Bold.pdf

[anderslundstedt]

I had never heard of the Wolfram Mathematica fonts before so this made me curious. Googling does not give me much information. Does Mathematica really use a bespoke font?

[apoorvpotnis]

@anderslundstedt it seems so. It has a serif and sans serif versions as well, matching with Times New Roman and Helvetica respectively. I couldn't find them online anywhere; I don't even see them mentioned anywhere. I found the files in my Windows Wolfram Mathematica 14.1 installation. Apparently, they used to provide type1 versions of these fonts as well in the previous versions, which had LaTeC support as well.

[cormullion]

Hi! It's an interesting question.

JuliaMono is mainly an exercise in pragamatism. Like all fonts, its design is the result of a series of trade-offs. So, while internal consistency and beautiful glyph shapes are always nice to have, there are many other factors in play - such as compatibility with users' expectations, technical limitations, resolution and width restrictions, resource availability, legibility concerns, etc.

JuliaMono's particular brand of pragmatism will -- in general -- produce glyph shapes that are closer to what users would experience from other fonts. So, for example, script and fraktur characters are going to look more similar to the LaTeX designs that users are already familiar with in many other editing environments.

Unicode (also fairly pragmatic) is unhelpful here. It's not easy to design "unmodulated sans serif" versions of U+1d400 -> U+1d433!

Perhaps there's a demand for a monospaced programming font with professionally-designed unmodulated sans-serif Math Script and fraktur character sets? But, so far, the level of demand for such a font hasn't persauded anybody to put in the necessary time and money to make it happen.

[apoorvpotnis]

I see. Recently, there's been some activity regarding sans serif math fonts. Daniel Flipo's Lete Sans Math and Concrete Math use unmodulated calligraphic letters based on Claudio Beccari's design. Antonis Tsolomitis' NewCM Sans Math provides almost unmodulated (although not quite) calligraphic designs, with a few Fraktur letters. An excellent set of matching script and Fraktur letters is provided by GFS Neo-Hellenic Math. I consider them to be of very high quality.

If Julia Mono decides to provide unmodulated designs someday in the future, then it'll probably the first free font in the world to do so (after the proprietary Mathematica fonts). I made this request mostly in anticipation of increased popularity of automated theorem provers, which are getting powerful day by day to advancements in AI.

P.S. Let me know if anyone wants the Mathematica font files. I'm not sure if releasing them on the internet is allowed, but I sure can privately mail them.

[cormullion]

There are some great maths-capable fonts around - but it’s finding them fixed-width that’s difficult. 😂

I’ll dig out my old Mathematica fonts and take another look at their design.

[apoorvpotnis]

Perhaps this is my inexperience speaking, but what's the issue with just keeping the skeletal forms of the existing glyphs and making them unmodulated?

P.S. Other glyphs, such as integrals are currently modulated.

[cormullion]

Well, there are no skeletons - so someone would have to redraw each/every glyph …

[apoorvpotnis]

Well, there are no skeletons - so someone would have to redraw each/every glyph …

Is it possible to "copy" the glyphs of the Mathematica fonts? I don't know the legal aspects of this, but there are numerous legal, free clones of Helvetica, Times and Courier. So, it is permissible to just copy the glyphs from this font? Because if I understand correctly, the Mathematica Mono glyphs are more or less compatible with Julia Mono (perhaps with slight modifications).