Hack is a monospaced typeface that is designed to optimize the display of source code text.
This document outlines the core ideas on which we build to continually improve Hack. Ideally, they serve as a final rationale to decide disputes of whatever nature.
### Primary Design Targets
## Design Targets
- ASCII glyph set (used to display the body of all source code text)
- font sizes between 8 - 14 px
- cross-platform, cross font renderer support on Linux, OS X, and Windows operating systems
- desktop text editor text displays
- terminal emulator text displays
- website text displays
- print text displays
Hack is a general purpose typeface for source code. The _needs of the many_ describe our core design targets. Generally, an issue that affects 90% of users, gets a higher priority than one that 'only' affects 10%.
### Core
### Primary Design Optimizations
- **ASCII glyph set**; generally speaking, all source code is limited to ASCII. Content/comments/documentation, on the other hand, often includes non-ASCII characters. The former gets precendence over the latter.
- Font-sizes between **8-14 px**, line-height >= 1
- **Cross-platform**, cross font renderer support on Linux, OS X, and Windows operating systems
- Usage in **common developer scenarios** (on digital displays): text editors, terminals, embedded as webfont, etc.
- legibility - establish differences in the appearance of similar glyph shapes so as to properly identify different Unicode code points
- readability - glyph shape and spacing optimizations to improve the capacity to read character-character, word-word, and code block-code block combinations in source code
- visual semantics - establish semantic commonalities for glyphs used in source code text and create common visual designs within these semantic groups
## Goals, areas of improvement
- **Legibility** - establish differences in the appearance of similar glyph shapes so as to properly identify different Unicode code points
- **Readability** - glyph shape and spacing optimizations to improve the capacity to read character-character, word-word, and code block-code block combinations in source code
- **Visual semantics** - establish semantic commonalities for glyphs used in source code text and create common visual designs within these semantic groups
### Secondary Design Targets
- All glyphs outside of the ASCII set (including extended character sets used for the display of comments in source code)
- All font sizes outside of the primary design targets
- All forms of text display outside of the primary design targets
David van Gemeren
GitHub