Iosevka Comfy

Private build of Iosevka, with a rounded style and open shapes, adjusted metrics, and overrides for almost all individual glyphs in both roman (upright) and italic (slanted) variants.

Details of the typeface

Iosevka Comfy is more vertically compact than the standard upstream configuration. Glyphs are rounder and have tailed ends or serifs only when those are required to both impose a predictable rhythm and keep characters distinct from each other.

The round and open shapes, tailed ends, and earless shoulders, can be discerned in those patterns:

• a, o, u (e.g. anonymous);
• i, t, l (e.g. illicit);
• j, g, y (e.g. jiggly);
• b, d (e.g. bidirectional);
• n, m (e.g. numeral);
• p, q (e.g. equip);
• 6, 9, &.

Considerations for romans and italics

Roman and italic variants are made to look more consistent while retaining their stylistic features. Unlike the default Iosevka style, the upright glyphs do not have a mixture of straight/blocky and curved or serified characters (special exceptions notwithstanding). While the italics do not have calligraphic tendencies that greatly contrast with their counterparts. The differences within each character set and between the variants themselves are nuanced. The intent is to make everything feel part of the same aesthetic. Distinctions are drawn on the premise of contributing to the demands of the design without ever calling attention to themselves (as opposed to sporadic calligraphic glyphs amid an otherwise austere presentation).

For italics, the earless shoulders in glyphs such as n, m, p, q change slightly to have a sturdier top which helps compensate for the added slant. Otherwise they would feel more rounded than their roman counterparts. We do not want that added implicit emphasis of extra roundedness because the slant is already sufficient: to emphasise the emphasis is the kind of exaggeration that Iosevka Comfy strives to eliminate.

The target of small point size

The overall appearance of the typeface is optimised for small point sizes. This informs the choice of certain glyphs that break the established patterns:

• The a has a serified or more blocky end, even though other glyphs have tailed ("pointier") ends. This is because at small point sizes the single storey a can be mistaken for an o as the tail is too subtle. The serif fixes that. Why single storey? Because a double storey is too blocky at small sizes and thus inconsistent with the open character of the typeface.

• The D has a top and bottom serif and a curved body to disambiguate it from the capital O (which is more round). At small point sizes, TODO looks clear whereas with a non-serif D it reads like TOOO (the D is almost the same as an O).

• Same principle for I whose serifs help one tell it apart from l.

• The m has a short middle leg to prevent the letter's lines from visually blending into a box-like shape (as is the case with the default Iosevka at small point sizes). It otherwise exhibits the same rounded/earless patterns.

The target of small point sizes also informs the decision to use squared punctuation marks and the % sign (the percent looks like ./. instead of o/o). They look more crisp.

It is important to stress that these decisions are made in light of the target range of point sizes, which is between 8 and 13. If we were to design towards another end, then we would do things differently (the open shapes would not be necessary, the aforementioned exceptions would not be required, punctuation marks could be circular, and so on).

Optimal point sizes for the author are: 8, 10, 11, 13. While "false friends" which increase the height of characters without actually adjusting the line width and height are: 10.5, 12, 13.5. We call them "false friends" because while they appear to have an effect, they do not actually increase the size of the font consistently: they break expectations and make the overall appearance feel more vertically compact than it should be.

Those granted, Iosevka Comfy looks decent at larger point sizes. The author uses it for presentations.

[ For the :height face attribute in GNU Emacs, the value is equal to the point size × 10. ]

Comparison to base Iosevka

This is a regular Emacs session with the default font set to point size 10 (a :height face attribute of 100).

Variants

Iosevka Comfy comes in five variants, all of which share the same stylistic overrides, as documented above.

• iosevka-comfy is monospaced and supports ligatures. Apart from ligatures, it allows certain glyphs, such as arrows, to occupy more than one block.

• iosevka-comfy-fixed is strictly monospaced and does not support ligatures. All glyphs are exactly the same width. Use this if you prefer it or if your application (e.g. terminal emulator) does not recognise iosevka-comfy as a monospaced font.

• iosevka-comfy-duo is quasi-proportional and supports ligatures. The naturally wide glyphs, such as m, are allowed to occupy two blocks instead of one.

• iosevka-comfy-wide is the same as iosevka-comfy except it is noticeably wider. It also looks taller than iosevka-comfy even though both variants fit the same number of lines on a screen.

• iosevka-comfy-wide-fixed same as iosevka-comfy-wide though it is strictly monospaced and does not support ligatures.

Note that the iosevka-comfy-duo, iosevka-comfy-wide, and iosevka-comfy-wide-fixed use a different style for the m character. Instead of the one with a shorter middle leg, they let all legs have the same length. The short middle leg in m that we need in the narrow monospaced variants is necessary for legibility, especially at small point sizes. Otherwise it is a gimmick, so we remove it in the "wider" builds.

Install on GNU/Linux

Unless you have some exotic system, in which case you know what you are doing, you can install fonts for your local user by copying the .ttf files or their directories in ~/.local/share/fonts/. For system-wide installation, place them in /usr/share/fonts/.

Depending on your system, you may need to delete the tff or ttf-unhinted builds. Though this is not strictly necessary, as the system knows which one to pick.

When in doubt, install locally.

Build information

Iosevka Comfy is configured in accordance with the documentation of the upstream project. This practically means that we define our private-build-plans.toml, install the npm dependencies, and then build the .ttf files with something like the following for each variant:

npm run build -- ttf::iosevka-comfy

It seems that queueing the builds, such as with a for loop, does not work as intended: the variants are not differentiated from the base iosevka-comfy build.

The last update to Iosevka Comfy was done on 2022-06-02 using upstream version v15.4.2, commit 76a87155.

Each file is provided as-is in the hope that it may prove useful, but is otherwise intended only for my private use.