Technically, font healing is a neat idea. It fails for text that does not meat its requirements, i.e. two ‘m’ next to each other. Depending on the characters around them, this might create two different ‘m’.
This is unavoidable, of course. The only solution are proportional fonts. So font healing is a nice idea. It creates a more consistent spacing at the price of less consistent glyphs. Whether one likes this compromise, is a matter of taste. I personally lean towards consistent glyphs, but I did not try it for an extended period.
I’m not sure I’d consider that “failing”. At first glance, I don’t mind the distinct “m” glyphs being juxtaposed. But perhaps I’d find it annoying after a while.
Maybe ‘failing’ is too strong. What I mean is that in situations like the one I showed, texture healing cannot solve the problem of uneven texture. Not that they claimed it does. It just eases the problem. I like to know the trade-offs. When does it provide an improvement and when not? What tensions does that create?
From a users point of view, I do not know if it ‘fails’ or not. I totally agree with you. Maybe the I would find to distinct ‘m’ glyphs annoying, maybe not. And example emphasizes the ‘problem’. Maybe, I woukd even notice while coding or writing. To know that, I need to try. I just like to know the trade-offs in advance.
When reading the announcement post, I was indeed hoping they’d include an example word with two "m"s in a row, so I was glad to see the example here. I don’t mind it, but it does feel almost dishonest to exclude that case from their post.
Yeah, I am always happy if a project not only mentions where it shines but also where it does not. But it is common practice not to do so. Same in academic publishing. Everybody is focused on selling oneself, it seems.
Ideally, texture healing would distribute the resizing over the whole word, so it would look better and be used in more cases. But that is not possible with OpenType fonts as far as I know.
Commit Mono has smart kerning, which is similar, but it only shifts, not morphs, the shapes. So it avoids that the same letter looks differently in different places. It also works on triplets, not just pairs, so it is more widely applicable. See this comparison.
Technically, font healing is a neat idea. It fails for text that does not meat its requirements, i.e. two ‘m’ next to each other. Depending on the characters around them, this might create two different ‘m’.
This is unavoidable, of course. The only solution are proportional fonts. So font healing is a nice idea. It creates a more consistent spacing at the price of less consistent glyphs. Whether one likes this compromise, is a matter of taste. I personally lean towards consistent glyphs, but I did not try it for an extended period.
I’m not sure I’d consider that “failing”. At first glance, I don’t mind the distinct “m” glyphs being juxtaposed. But perhaps I’d find it annoying after a while.
Maybe ‘failing’ is too strong. What I mean is that in situations like the one I showed, texture healing cannot solve the problem of uneven texture. Not that they claimed it does. It just eases the problem. I like to know the trade-offs. When does it provide an improvement and when not? What tensions does that create?
From a users point of view, I do not know if it ‘fails’ or not. I totally agree with you. Maybe the I would find to distinct ‘m’ glyphs annoying, maybe not. And example emphasizes the ‘problem’. Maybe, I woukd even notice while coding or writing. To know that, I need to try. I just like to know the trade-offs in advance.
When reading the announcement post, I was indeed hoping they’d include an example word with two "m"s in a row, so I was glad to see the example here. I don’t mind it, but it does feel almost dishonest to exclude that case from their post.
Yeah, I am always happy if a project not only mentions where it shines but also where it does not. But it is common practice not to do so. Same in academic publishing. Everybody is focused on selling oneself, it seems.
Ideally, texture healing would distribute the resizing over the whole word, so it would look better and be used in more cases. But that is not possible with OpenType fonts as far as I know.
Commit Mono has smart kerning, which is similar, but it only shifts, not morphs, the shapes. So it avoids that the same letter looks differently in different places. It also works on triplets, not just pairs, so it is more widely applicable. See this comparison.