hckiang / font-new-heterodox-mono
Some years ago I made an adaption of the beautiful open-source font Old Standard TT into a monospaced font for my own use. I have been using this a lot as my programming font but I had never made it public. Despite the typeface still has some room for improvement, I decided perhaps I should upload it in case someone finds this useful or wants to help developing it, as there are almost no free alternatives of this kind of monospace fonts out there. In 2021 summer, I channelled some of my COVID-19 boredom into creating a new weight.
I felt that it is very much non-"standard" in the computer science/programming community to use this kind of typeface in programming, so I named it "New Heterodox" as opposed to "Old Standard". (Occasionally you may see Century School Book Mono in textbooks but it is definitely not popular) Ironically, "Old Standard" was named as opposed to "Obyknovennaya Novaya" ("New Standard"), and now in the age of computers, the old-time new standard has become a new heterodoxy, as in many other things in design.
Over the years I have grown increasingly tired of looking at the mainstream sans-serif "programming fonts" all days. Underlying many of them seems to be a shared vision that only "readability", or in other words, utility, matters; while aesthetics, elegance and feeling are somewhat a by-product, some sort of an opinion that needs to be justified through some "objective" reasoning around readability, in which history and tradition have no roles to play. But this vision is rather awkward in itself: if we go back a hundred years and ask a French whether they find Didot difficult to read, they may tell you that it is totally readable, as historically it was not uncommon to set newspapers in high-contrast typefaces like the Didot, while nowadays most people would probably say that Dejavu Mono is more readable for coding. Once we expand our time horizon a little, it is immediately obvious that much, but of course, not all, reasonings around readability nowadays are, rather than some objectively derived right-thing-to-be, nothing more than traditions and customs: one which has been passed down from the days when the resolution of computer screens was too low to accurately display the serifs.
