Powerline symbols

[amadeus]

Understandably I am in the minority with this issue, but I figured I would post it here to get your thoughts.

I use Source Code Pro in MacVim, but more importantly I use with a special plugin called Powerline that has support for some custom glyphs that provide an overall nicer user experience.

The Powerline project includes a font patching tool to add these glyphs manually, however it has some issues when placing them, as can be seen by the screenshot below:

Notice how the arrows and Line Number glyphs seem to get chopped off at the bottom due to their vertical alignment being a tad lower than what should be expected?

Since I don't know much about font development, here's a link by the project author that explains the issue.

powerline/powerline#14 (comment)

Sounds like the potential fixes either include some custom hackery with the font patcher to fix the glyph alignment or a potential fix in Source Code Pro itself, however it could also be the reason for it not working could be an intentional design piece on your own. He also mentioned potentially submitting a patch that includes the glyphs built in, however I am not sure whether you guys would even be open to that in the first place.

[miguelsousa]

Seems related to #16. The best solution is to have these glyphs added to the fonts. Is this something you want to contribute?

[Lokaltog]

I'd be happy to fine-tune the glyphs and open a pull request later if you want to include the glyphs in Source Code Pro.

[Lokaltog]

I've created a version of Source Code Pro with the patched glyphs here.

Here's a list of the glyphs that are included.

[frankrolf]

I agree with @miguelsousa, for best user experience it would be a good idea to add the glyphs to SCP.

The font patcher is currently adding the same glyphs (same alignment, same size, same thickness, same design) to any font being patched, which makes for different results. Additionally, re-generating the font binary via the font patcher might break unexpected things.

Thank you @Lokaltog for uploading the patched SCP, this is a good point to start from. We would now need to add the same glyphs to all the other weights as well.

Before doing this; I have several questions:

• The glyphs you added to SCP are different from the glyphs found in the fontpatcher here:
  https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/blob/develop/powerline/fontpatcher/fontpatcher-symbols.sfd
  I see the new glyphs have better outlines, but are also missing the outlined F and T glyphs? Are those unneccessary?
• How were the Unicode values chosen?
  For instance, there is a (new) unicode value for a padlock (U+1F512).
  Also, several pointing triangles exist already.

Thanks!

[Lokaltog]

These glyphs are for the upcoming version of Powerline, so they have been changed a bit. They have been redrawn, and the code points have been moved to the Private Use Area. The F and T glyphs have been removed and won't be included at all in the new version of Powerline.

I wasn't aware that any padlock glyphs already existed in Unicode, and I haven't seen any fonts with pointing triangles that fill the entire height and width of the font. I had the impression that the PUA was the best area to put these glyphs, but please let me know if you think that they would be better suited at another location. A criticism of the previous version of Powerline was that its glyphs were located somewhere other than the PUA.

It would be awesome if anyone who knows anything about font design could polish the glyphs to fit perfectly with the SCP font design and for bold/italic fonts, since the glyphs are basically just stretched and moved to fit the dimensions of the font being patched. I know little about font design and the patcher is mostly a quick way of getting decent looking symbols for Powerline.

My goal with this version of Powerline is to get as many coding fonts as possible to include the new glyphs, and to be able to link to those fonts in the powerline-fonts repo. Ideally users won't have to patch fonts at all but rather just download pre-patched fonts from the original authors.

The specification of the glyphs/code points that are going to be used in Powerline is available in the docs.

[amadeus]

Hey Guys,

Curious if there has been any more movement on this issue? There's a custom version that's out, but it would be great to have it standardized within the font itself.

[pauldhunt]

We are considering adding the powerline symbols, but it will be a (short?) while before we touch the fonts again as I am currently working on Source Sans and preparing for a trip to India to present some workshops there during the month of March.

[amadeus]

Awesome, thanks for the update! Really appreciate it!

[haguro]

Just as an FYI and to save you few clicks, the glyph table (and the rest of the documentation) seem to have been moved here ;-)

[yacoob]

@pauldhunt any news? :)

[pauldhunt]

no news. busy with other projects at the moment.