Greek upper and lower thetas are hard to distinguish

[source-foundry]

Greek upper and lower thetas are hard to distinguish

[chrissimpkins]

I was worried about that. See Jul 16 note in this thread about the Greek set:

#11

Could consider going with a more rounded glyph for the upper case. I'm not sure that the stroke in the middle has much room for improvement to distinguish the two. Much shorter in width and it looks like a zero. Serifs won't show up at small sizes. Thoughts?

[pmetzger]

A traditional upper case theta has a center bar that looks more like an "H" than a horizontal line (see, say, the Wikipedia page for Theta). This, combined with a rounder glyph for upper case and a narrower one for lower case, may be sufficient to provide visual distinction.

I can bring in an actual Greek or two to give advice if that will help.

[chrissimpkins]

That is helpful. Let me see what I can come up with.

[tpoisot]

I would agree with @pmetzger suggestion. I use uppercase/lowercase greek letters to distinguish between arrays and single values, and it is hard to distinguish using Hack (at the moment).

[chrissimpkins]

Queued for next release.

[tpoisot]

👍 !

[chrissimpkins]

Just finished these tonight. I went with a much rounder upper case theta that I hope will address this issue. I should have a build out this weekend that you can run through your editors in order to confirm that we accomplished this.

[chrissimpkins]

The new Greek upper case theta symbol is available in the v2.016 test build of the Hack fonts. You can download them here and give them a try in your editors. Let me know what how they look for you.

Hack-Regular.ttf
Hack-Bold.ttf
Hack-Italic.ttf
Hack-BoldItalic.ttf

[pmetzger]

It seem better but the distinctions still seem a bit subtle. Perhaps there is still room for improvement? Even if serifing the - in the upper case theta is also subtle it might add a little more to the overall difference?

[chrissimpkins]

What platform are you on? If possible, will you post screenshots and let us know what text sizes you are using to view the fonts? We are pretty much maxed within the confines of the pixel grid to expand the O shape. We could add small serifs, but I don't know whether they will help or detract from the appearance of the glyph as it is decreased down to commonly used source code text sizes. Definitely a situation where trial and error with design and hinting will be in order. All things that can be done.

[chrissimpkins]

These changes were included in the v2.017 release

[chrissimpkins]

Leaving open to review the shapes again in the future.

[chrissimpkins]

Something that you would still like to work on? Please reopen if so.