The APL Orchard

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rabbitgrowth

05:54

Very excited to hear from the Array Cast that the APL386 font is getting redrawn! I've always been a bit bothered by the irregularities in the old version.

3 hours later…

Adám

08:38

@rabbitgrowth You can try the latest version (ttf only) at abrudz.github.io/APL386 but be aware that the currently most obvious issue is too large line height.

rabbitgrowth

09:13

Nice. How close is it to being finished?

Adám

Very close. It is the only remaining issue (I know of), and it is a regression from the previous version.

rabbitgrowth

Cool, looking forward to the final version!

RikedyP

09:38

@PaulMansour I think it's fine to see bracket axis as "syntactic sugar" over using the rank operator with dyadic transpose, but using rank and transpose is a good way of understanding what enclose-with-axies ⊂[] and merge axes ,[] are really like

RubenVerg

10:24

@Adám hmm, not sure what I think of the new epsilons

Adám

@RubenVerg Per Aaron Hsu's request, to make ∊ more distinct from e and ϵ.

RubenVerg

is there bqn support?

@Adám hmm

I think I might get used to it

diaereses look closer together, that's nice

thin tilde is weird but I think I like it

no TinyAPL support I'm guessing, might make a PR(:

Adám

@RubenVerg To the best of the designer's ability. The font contains double-struck letters (just the ones needed for BQN) but they seem to not be mapped to the right code points (probably because the designer's software couldn't handle non-BMP chars).

RubenVerg

I'll have to redesign a bunch of stuff though

@Adám are they weirdly thin like the ones from bqn386?

oh, love dotted zero

Adám

No, they are a complete rethink of what double-struck means, and I rather like it:

RubenVerg

10:39

hmm

I guess it's easy to add the other ones if anything

are they easy to distinguish at small sizes?

Adám

@RubenVerg Me too, but the dot might be a little too heavy. Maybe it should be as small as ·

@RubenVerg Probably not. I suppose they'll be distinct by looking un-even in heaviness. Syntax colouring will help too. (In fact, if one has proper syntax colouring for BQN, then they could be identical to the single-stroke letters!)

RubenVerg

suppose 𜳖 could be supported with the same system as well

Adám

@RubenVerg Is that an outlined A that got mangled?

Yes, that could work by simply making all parts double. Not sure you could distinguish between 𜳞 and 𝕀 but there are plenty of other homoglyphs, so that's probably ok.

RubenVerg

yeah it's an outlined A, U+1ccd6

is there small caps support?

Adám

No.

And in general, no fancy open type features.

E.g. it might be good to be able to turn off the zero dot.

@RubenVerg Something is funky, though. If I force the BQN website to use the font, the bolds are inconsistent:

I have no idea what happened to N and y here.

RubenVerg

11:15

@Adám oh I meant the actual Unicode chars

Adám

@RubenVerg Eh, Unicode doesn't have small caps codepoints.

RubenVerg

TinyAPL uses smallcaps J and Vyxal 3.5 uses smallcaps R

smallcaps J

Adám

Oh, that's what you mean. Right, so the font currently doesn't have TinyAPL support, but of course, it can always be extended. I'd prefer PRs over rename-forks, but it is public domain.

RubenVerg

@Adám a stylistic set for tildes on and nor and obverse with the tilde in the middle would be nice

@Adám I have a fork just because it's spun of BQN386 and I remember something about not taking prs for other langs

Adám

@RubenVerg Sort of. I did experiment with that, and it turns out that the font has such thick stroke that middle just doesn't work.

RubenVerg

11:19

if you now support bqn in APL386 I'd love to PR

@Adám ah

Adám

@RubenVerg You might want to wait until the designer fixes the last problem and updates the source.

RubenVerg

sure yeah

TinyAPL386 has a folder with all the new glyphs - I'll have to store that somewhere else, I guess

Adám

11:35

@RubenVerg I don't know enough about the Glyph app (can't try it, since I'm not on a Mac). I don't know about the advantages of separate files and a single large file, nor if they can co-exist. I personally wouldn't mind if the source was split.

RubenVerg

I don't use Glyphs either

I just draw separate SVGs in Inkscape and then import them in FontForge

is the new font done in Glyphs?

not sure how I would contribute to it then

Adám

Me neither, but maybe there are ways to convert.

RubenVerg

12:03

does the font use any Glyphs features FontForge doesn't support?

Adám

I don't think so, since it doesn't have any fancy features at all. In fact, I think every glyph is independent, instead of having e.g. á link to a.

Adám

12:22

What would be good names to distinguish the numeric vector 13 10 from ⎕UCS 13 10?
Newline and NewlineSequence could be either.
NewlineString for the latter is inaccurate as it is actually a character vector, not a string (and NewlineCharacterVector is just too unwieldy)

2 hours later…

Adám

14:45

Do you have any idea…