Raph Levien
levien.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Raph Levien is a software developer and font and graphics researcher behind Inconsolata, Spiro, and a PhD thesis on curves.
What HN saysCommenters recommend his thesis and papers on Euler spirals and elastica curves, and say they have used Inconsolata happily for years.
75HN people shared it
68linked it in comments
10stories submitted
266story points
9 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Inconsolata40 people · 163 points · first shared 2007 · 60 comments on HN
- 2Thesis.pdf7 people · first shared 2018
- 3Phd6 people · first shared 2014
- 4The Decommoditization of Protocols (1998)5 people · 102 points · first shared 2007 · 11 comments on HN
- 5Tmetric HOWTO4 people · first shared 2008
- 6Spiro3 people · first shared 2014
- 7Gain3 people · first shared 2021
- 8Gzilla3 people · first shared 2018
- 9Patents available to GNU GPL licensed software2 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 10Compact.pdf2 people · first shared 2014
- 11Svg2 people · first shared 2020
- 12Tractatus1 people · first shared 2022
- 13Output dependent feedback.pdf1 people · first shared 2017
- 14Fontfocus1 people · first shared 2023
- 15Homepage1 people · first shared 2023
What HN people wrote when they linked it
masfuerte · 2026-02-09
You might be familiar with these, but GP wrote a couple of excellent references on Euler spirals:
https://raphlinus.github.io/curves/2021/02/19/parallel-curves.html
https://levien.com/phd/euler_hist.pdf
Jarmsy · 2022-11-27
No - it's an elastica, which cannot be represented exactly as a bezier. Raph Levien's work is a great read on this
https://www.levien.com/phd/thesis.pdf
and
https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2008/EECS-2008-103.pdf
raphlinus · 2022-01-31
This is a great paper, will likely move the state of the art forward. I've been aware of Kubelka-Munk representations of painting surfaces since [1], which used a six-dimensional space (scattering and absorption for 3 wavelength bands, not really spectral). Doing it all in RGB makes it way more practical.
I'm fiddling with an alternative approach based on IPT-like color spaces, which won't need the 10MB lookup table, and will have a tunable parameter for paint opacity (between watercolors and pastels). So far I have promising but not compelling results. If people are working on, say, a free software painting application, get in touch.
[1]: https://www.levien.com/gimp/wetdream.html
Xavdidtheshadow · 2020-11-20
I've been a happy Inconsolata user for years. It looks great, characters are unique, and it stays out of the way.
https://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
delhanty · 2020-02-21
For a technical analysis of Hobby splines I recommend HN raphlinus's PhD thesis Section 4.7 [0] referenced just yesterday in the submission on Google Font Analytics [1].
[0] https://levien.com/phd/thesis.pdf
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22369500
montroser · 2019-05-11
This is wonderful news. Spiro splines are very cool, but I never considered them a real option for any projects I was working on because of the licensing issue. Hobby splines were the patent unencumbered next best choice as far as I could tell, but Spiro semantics always seemed incrementally preferable.
Raph's thesis on splines is a fun read:
https://www.levien.com/phd/thesis.pdf
And the original paper on Hobby splines:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2FBF02187690.pdf
jacobolus · 2018-02-13
Raph Levien's thesis is great, http://www.levien.com/phd/phd.html
yati · 2015-08-31
I came to Mac OS recently from Linux and while I like Menlo, I found myself quickly going back to Inconsolata[1], which is really great for long coding hours, and works especially well for me with the dark solarized color scheme.
[1]: http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
donut2d · 2013-09-09
Looks interesting. Really wish I could download it now. I definitely want to see it when it's done, but how will know when that is? If I had even a beta version to play with I'm much more likely to remember to check for updates later.
That said, I'm really happy to see more programming fonts! I love Inconsolata[1] and used to use it for everything. However, recently I've been using Source Code Pro[2] and can't break myself away from it.
[1]: http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
[2]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcecodepro.adobe/
dcoupl · 2012-09-12
I've been using Inconsolata for the past few months and really liking it. RubyMine does not support it at the moment, but it works great in Terminal, Sublime Text 2, Textmate, etc.
Inconsolata is freely available here: http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
Cieplak · 2012-05-19
I highly recommend Inconsolata:
http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Inconsolata
ecaron · 2010-08-14
Inconsolata - http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html - I won't work on in any IDE without first making this the default. It is incredibly worth of consistently being considered among the best programming fonts (http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts).
CitizenKane · 2010-01-15
My current favorite monospace font is Incosolata http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html It's an amazingly legible font and looks great and small and large font sizes.
r11t · 2009-12-24
I recently started using Inconsolata which looks fantastic at both large and small sizes http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html and also made the "Top 10 Programming Fonts" list here : http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts
oneplusone · 2009-11-25
Inconsolata is amazing. It looks amazing at larger sizes. Also it is free.
http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
busy_beaver · 2007-04-07
That's a great looking font --- elegant, but still LEGIBLE.
I found the download page here:
http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
peterfirefly · 2023-04-01
If you haven't heard of him, the joke's on you. Maybe. In any case, his work is worth looking into.
He has done interesting work in font creation, font building primitives, rasterization, 2D drawing, and resistant social network graphs (which turns out to be more or less equivalent to the Old Sk00l Google Juice system).
He was recently instrumental in performing a wonderful experiment in editor building -- wonderful because of the way it failed. It was something that one would think would work, but somehow it didn't. It's always interesting when intelligent and well-informed people are wrong about something. Perhaps there was too much Design and too little boring boiler plate.
https://levien.com/
https://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
https://levien.com/phd/phd.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodipodi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato
https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.html
rodarima · 2025-11-06
Raph Levien wrote the original Gzilla browser of which Dillo was forked in late 1999: http://www.levien.com/gzilla/
starkparker · 2024-12-16
dillo-0.1.0 release notes from March 2000:
> * Changed the licence to GPL. (Raph agreed on that)
So it's probably just a typo in the article. Intended point is that the license was changed from Gzilla's private copyright notice[1] to the GPL of the time, which would probably be v2.
Nonetheless Dillo's code is also licensed under GPLv3 now.
1: https://levien.com/gzilla/Copying.txt
mftrhu · 2021-10-20
It's meant to be used in print, and print has bleed. It's too thin, by far, when it is used on screen (or even modern laser printers): see https://www.levien.com/type/cmr/gain.html
JorgeGT · 2021-07-22
They are too thin because they were designed to be printed, accounting for the spread of the ink on the paper (gain): https://www.levien.com/type/cmr/gain.html
pabs3 · 2021-06-11
Quite, here is an example of the right way to do it:
https://levien.com/patents.html
dredmorbius · 2021-04-15
Not AFAIA, though that's possible.
The original concept didn't have that.
Another approach was tried by Advogato, which had a "trust root" (ultimately Raph Levien). It was based around individuals rather than content and ... that also has issues. Nothing pathologically bad in the case of Advogato, though the site largely languished.
For Levien's concept, see http://www.levien.com/thesis/compact.pdf
morelisp · 2021-04-13
Everything old is new again.
https://www.levien.com/free/tmetric-HOWTO.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato
Endlessly · 2020-04-13
And Sodipodi started as a fork of Gill:
https://www.levien.com/svg/
Here is the “Secret Origin of SVG” per the W3C:
https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Secret_Origin_of_SVG
theoh · 2019-05-27
That Chimera was pretty nice, all right:
http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/chimera-www
In a similar category, but using Gtk, was Ralph Levien's gzilla https://www.levien.com/gzilla/
zeveb · 2019-01-21
Note that raphlinus is … the creator of Inconsolata (https://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html)!
FWIW, I really like Source Code Pro — it's my default font everywhere. Inconsolata is nice, too, but I like the little hook on the lowercase 'l' in SCP. Also, SCP abbreviates to the name of a Unix command, which is cool
lindig · 2018-12-08
The interactive tool linked in the article does not work in Safari for me. I does work in Chromium.
https://levien.com/euler_explorer/
flukus · 2018-04-20
20 lines of C looks pretty simple to me: http://www.levien.com/gimp/hello.html
If C is too hard maybe you want c#: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/gtksharp/hello-world/
speps · 2018-02-13
Spiro Curves are a nice alternative: http://www.levien.com/spiro/