> ”Source Code Pro was a step down from Inconsolata that preceded it.”
I’m not aware of any shared history between Inconsolata and Source Code Pro. Do you know of any? On the on there hand, Inconsolata is heavily influenced by Lucas De Groot’s Consolas.
As I noted, Inconsolata existed before they began work on SCP. It is an objective improvement on Consolas, and thus worthy of attention and
change.
Normally, when putting in the effort to make something new, one tries to make it better than what came before, on some axis. Introducing a new thing less good than what came before is a waste of our time and a distraction from the better things. I don't doubt that designing SCP or B612 was educational for its designers, but that is not a good enough reason to adopt it, or even to study whether to adopt it.
The new thing should be better. Why is that hard to process?
> "Introducing a new thing less good than what came before is a waste of our time and a distraction from the better things.... The new thing should be better. Why is that hard to process?"
Using "good" and "better" implies that there's some objective measurement against a common set of criteria, which is not necessarily the case from the standpoint of the designers, nor for those who choose to use the fonts and for what purpose. Better according to you? Sure, but I'd frame that as an opinion rather than objective fact.
Why should B612 be better for programming than Inconsolata, Consolas, or Source Code Pro?
For that matter, I don't think you can say that any one of those fonts is better than any other, for anyone but yourself. I find Inconsolata too narrow and cramped on the screen, compared to the wider SCP. And the cute lowercase "t" in Inconsolata is by comparison lost on me after 8 hours of coding, and I don't notice in absence in SCP.
In fact, aside from its weird glyph choices for some code points, SCR is very much like Consolas or Inconsolata of one point size up, but with a scan line removed -- e.g., SCP 9 is pixel-for-pixel a squashed Consolas 10, with trivial alterations. So it might be said to be "Consolas Squat with some weird glyphs".
I wouldn't call Inconsolata an improvement on Consolas. They're certainly similar, but personally I find Consolas to be far neater. Of course, this is subjective - but that's the point; it's not an objective improvement.
I’m not aware of any shared history between Inconsolata and Source Code Pro. Do you know of any? On the on there hand, Inconsolata is heavily influenced by Lucas De Groot’s Consolas.