New release?

[paride]

Hi @chrissimpkins,

Mostly FYI: in January 2021 the freeze process for Debian 11 (bullseye) will begin. If you'd like a new version of Hack to be included in the distribution this is a good time to cut a release.

[chrissimpkins]

Thanks Paride! I'll do my best to dive back in here over the holidays when I have a bit of time to invest. There is a significant amount of work that I need and want to do. I need to carve out a big block of time for the needs and will tackle the wants as time allows. Let me see if I can pull a release together by Jan. Ideally, this work will include an approach that supports much more frequent updates and less manual involvement on my end. I have ideas about how to approach this so that I am not a blocker on Hack work.

[chrissimpkins]

And my apologies to all who have added requests/feedback/info/change proposals/new alternate glyph designs + build work. I recognize that I am blocking all of this. Will try to get to it asap!

[MartenBE]

@chrissimpkins off-topic: we really appreciate the hard work you have put in and understand that you do this in your spare time. Thank you very much for your effort! This font is truly great :)

[aaronmbos]

@chrissimpkins off-topic: we really appreciate the hard work you have put in and understand that you do this in your spare time. Thank you very much for your effort! This font is truly great :)

I second this. I've tried many fonts and always come back to Hack. I haven't found anything that renders as well as Hack across the board. Thank you!

[jlanzarotta]

@chrissimpkins off-topic: we really appreciate the hard work you have put in and understand that you do this in your spare time. Thank you very much for your effort! This font is truly great :)

I second this. I've tried many fonts and always come back to Hack. I haven't found anything that renders as well as Hack across the board. Thank you!

I third this. I too have tried many fonts (too many to count) and I always come back to Hack. I hope a new version is coming soon...

[chrissimpkins]

Thanks so much for all of these comments. I really appreciate it.

I've started to re-draw Hack from scratch. It's not clear to me if this will be a proposal for the next version of Hack or a new derivative. But I am convinced that we need to tear down and start over to improve the design and address a number of the open issues here (e.g., build system, hinting, how we approach alternate forms, etc).

I currently have a full ASCII glyph set regular weight master that is drawn at a smaller optical size than the current production version of Hack and am working through approaches to optical size optimizations across the source editor / terminal text size range so that design attributes will change according to the size that you need. This will take place in a variable font design space and the idea is that you will be able to slice a section of the design space that works best in your editor/terminal environment with fairly granular customization of details like ascender/descender heights, weight (to address light on dark vs. dark on light environments down to the level of finessing the weight according to color contrast used in your syntax highlighters), space at contour junctions, width of the glyphs, and width of the tabular spacing in the fixed width typeface. There is a great deal of room for optical size design optimization in the Hack family.

I've been dogfooding the single regular weight font in my editors/terminal for the last month and am pretty excited about how it works at the intended size. To my eye, it is better than the current Hack regular weight that it replaced and I haven't even started on the customization bits yet.

Hack has a reasonably large glyph set and the new project is not likely to reach character set parity without the involvement of others in the design effort (if at all). A large number of masters to support the full design space x a large character set = a great deal of time/effort and I know that I can't realistically commit to the development of thousands of outlines across many masters on my own. It will be free/open either in this repo or in another and anyone will have an opportunity to broaden the character set and customize the design according to their needs.

More to come. Let me experiment a bit more with my ideas, hear any thoughts that you have about the approach, and then I'll open this work up.

[rumpelsepp]

This is awesome… Looking forward to the results!

[jeffteixeira]

Any news?

[allefeld]

Could we have an interim release, even if the large-scale renovation takes longer?

I'm particularly interested in the fix of the en-dash width here: #426 (comment)
The files in the attached ttf.zip-file have a version 4.00 – is that just a demo for the fix, or is it recommended for regular use?

[l3u]

I'd also love to see the hyphen and en dash fixed in a new release … any news about this?!