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).
> I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting"
I don't know about such marketing copy, but keyboards with a "CoPilot key" are now standard, particularly on all Windows laptops, which is an even more egregious form of marketing.
> 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.
This font looks quite bad to me. Completely generic in some regards, barely distinguishable from any typical modern font, but where it chooses to distinguish itself it does so in ways that I find extremely non-conducive to the alleged purpose of readability. Does that highly-stylised lower-case f, or frankly incorrect C shape, really help anyone read?
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
The free trial version has a couple of fixed weights to try. It's missing all the advanced features (variable weight etc.) but it's enough to get an impression and to use it on a daily basis to see if you like it.
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.