I’m going to experiment with iA Writer Duospace as my writing font in Ulysses for a few weeks.
Standard Nitti looks terrific in Ulysses, but the new iA Writer Duospace (which is based off the recently released IBM Plex) is gorgeous as well. In fact, I like iA Writer’s approach so much, I bought the Nitti family last year and have been using it as my writing font in Ulysses since. I’ve always loved the thought and care that goes into iA Writer’s typography. It offers single and four 1.5 width characters. And born was the duospace concept.ĭuospace is a notion familiar from Asian fonts where there are single and double width characters. If you give 150% to the letters w, W, m, and M, you get a text image that has almost all benefits of a monospace font, but the text flows nicely. In Cyrillic, there are a couple of characters more that need breathing room. What about the w’s then? And if you give room to lower case letters, what about their parents? The M and the w look alright in mono, no? They almost look better, even… Well, not next to a free m. With Latin characters you need to free the m’s from their obsolete mechanical straight jacket.
Progressively, we came to realize that the right question is how to make a proportional font look like a monospace, but how many exceptions you allow until you lose the benefits of a sturdy monospace. We started from scratch, moved from proportional to monospace to three spaces (50% for i and j) and ended up with duospace for MWmw. This year, again, we set out exploring our own writing font. The folks at iA have been looking for new font to use in their iA Writer app (version 5.0 for iOS was launched just a couple of weeks ago), and they settled on the idea of a duospace font:
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