i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                 i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

e. e. cummings © 1952

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hyperlegible dyslexic

monday, 27 september 2021

this page consolidates the various font customizations applied to the Iosevka font used on this site, my Kindle and computers. Essentially, the configuration customizations elucidated in the various articles are relisted here in this single source for ease of reference and currency.

Three major influences occurred to my original Iosevka font settings over a matter of months after years of static usage on my computers for coding..

  • discovery of the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font. This font’s character variants, save for a few characters—notably the substituted “tailed” capital Q and some more “open” symbols—was adopted for its “legibility” and outright elegance. It also rendered a truly personal source code font!
  • usage on my Kindle Oasis as an e-reader font. i am an exclusive consumer of books on the e-reader. It is all about personalization of content format, fonts playing an important part of that. The Monolegible font provided the ultimate customization.
  • investigation of dyslexic fonts. A subreddit thread invited me to investigate dyslexic fonts more closely and prompted adoption of further changes to the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font character variants—notably the lower case b d and u—to create the Monolexic font.

This compilation is being made because one thing (above) led to the other, the end result of which, Monolexic’s cumulative changes have cycled back to impact the original source code font configuration.

exhibit

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ) ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( , . / ; ' [ ] \ ` - = < > ? : " { } | ~ _ +

character variants

toml file configuration to generate the hyperlegible and dyslexic character font variants..

[buildPlans.iosevka.variants] # inherits = "" # defaults [buildplans.iosevka.variants.design] capital-d = "more-rounded-serifless" # D capital-g = "toothed-serifless-hooked" # G capital-i = 'short-serifed' # I capital-j = "serifless" # J capital-k = "straight" # K capital-m = "flat-bottom" # M capital-q = "crossing" # Q capital-w = "straight-flat-top" # W a = "double-storey" b = 'toothless-corner' d = "toothed-serifless" e = "flat-crossbar" f = "flat-hook-crossbar-at-x-height" k = "straight" i = "hooky" j = "flat-hook-serifless" k = "straight" l = "flat-tailed" q = "diagonal-tailed" # fontforge mod r = "compact" t = "flat-hook-short-neck2" u = 'toothless-rounded' w = "straight-flat-top" y = "straight-turn" zero = "reverse-slashed" # 0 one = "nobase-flat-top-serif" # 1 two = "straight-neck" # 2 four = "closed" # 4 five = "oblique-upper-left-bar" # 5 six = "closed-contour" # 6 eight = "two-circles" # 8 brace = "straight" # {} ampersand = "upper-open" # & at = "short" # @ cyrl-ka = "symmetric-touching" # к eszet = "sulzbacher" # ß lower-iota = "flat-tailed" # ι lower-lambda = "straight-turn" # λ number-sign = "upright" paragraph-sign = "low" # ¶ # percent = "rings-continuous-slash" percent = "dots" # % ...

settings

configuration settings for the various generated fonts as reflected in the build script are..

font shape side bearing leading space width
source code 600 0.8 1.25 —
monolegible** 576 0.625 1.4185 1.5
quasilegible** 576 0.7 1.25 2
monolexic** 600 0.65 1.4185 2

**Kindle font

The big change is the application of the expanded shape cell width to the source code font—common source code programming fonts define condensed or half cell width characters to maximize the monospaced character density or content on displays. Beauty over form in this instance—a luxury afforded by today’s wider computer displays where content density is a non-issue. In practice, my experience has been that the added breathing room between characters plus their more geometric shapes produces a clarity which allows working one font size smaller, ultimately recovering the lost content density with a more pleasing font set rendering—a biased opinion, of course. YMMV.

The word focus gained by the enhanced spacing of the Monolexic font has been applied to the other e-reader fonts. A slightly tighter shape cell width is used for the Monolegible font with 1.5x spacing—to maintain overall visual columnar alignment. The Quasilegible font applies similar cell width and 2x spacing—to compensate for the proportional font.

fontforge

is used to complete the fonts..

  • to add a curly tailed lower case q
  • and for e-reader fonts, to widen the word spacing (by lengthening the Space character cell width)
  • and similarly doubling the cell width of the Emdash and Ellipsis monospaced characters—retaining the monospaced cell grid of the displayed page.

Refer to the above referenced site links to review the fontforge scripting gymnastics.

files

Of course, you are encouraged to further tweak these fonts to suit your own pair of “eyes”. The provided scripts should be modifiable to work on most computers by paying attention to and altering the relevant path references.

Check out the *Iosevka customization page—a complete build configuration file sample can be produced interactively!

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hyperlegible dyslexiccolophonlife listshadows and lightsearching this sitethe darnedest thingthe only thing i knowtruth or diethe miraculous thingthe storyabout healinghealing

sunday, 25 july 2021

with the focus on font type legibility satisfied (on my desktops, e-readers and web site), it was time to address the resultant aesthetic of this site.

So, with some further CSS tweaking and server side magic.. a big face lift!

First and foremost, the former outdented lower case lead in word following all headings—a quirky distinction this site has had from its inception as a stylistic signature—becomes paragraph indented with the leading three first words text transformed to X height upper case courtesy of the site’s Passenger/Nginx application <span></span> insertion and corresponding CSS, producing a less formal presentation—softening in my old age i guess. Paragraph spacing has also been tightened a smidgen in the direction of formatting convention—but not quite.

Next, the glaring bold width and extreme (default) contrast of bold highlights—there being only the regular and bold font weights available with the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font—has been replaced again with an X height all caps rendering and a lower contrast font colour. The X height reduces the stroke width and the font color localizes the emphasis where it belongs (imo), in the content.

Finally, italic highlights—which always look larger with their oblique elongated strokes (correctable with a CSS font size adjustment), to my eyes, just seem visually out of place embedded between words (which i suppose is the highlight intent.. not a big fan of italics obviously!)—get a similar treatment, sans the font weight and color. Not to be confused with but the same as the capitalized lead in words.

All of this serves to soften the default emphasis of HTML character highlighting on the content so one’s eyes are not distracted by visual “shouting”. (But really, only serves my aesthetic.. which is quite possibly very contrary)! In other words, easy on the eyes, hopefully friendlier and more welcoming.. but unexciting. No one has ever accused me of being too colourful. :)

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