Type designer here. I could look into this. Won’t be too difficult to modify things according to what people might prefer. Looking at the original Liquid fonts and what I could see on libavr32 there have already been some modifications and/or selection of certain specific variants of some characters (like the I with serifs).
Right now the font uses a maximum of 6 pixels horizontally per character (the 5 pixel wide M plus 1 pixel for spacing). Going lower than that would start affecting legibility in a bad way. Try to imagine an M using only 2 pixels between the vertical stems. It’s doable, but you definitely sacrifice legibility and end up having to rely a lot more on context to try to figure our what letter you are reading.
Basically, with an even number of pixels to represent the shapes, any glyph with odd-numbered stems or features (I, W, M, T, V, X, etc) will suffer either from bad spacing (on monospaced fonts) or nor enough pixels to show all the features that make the glyph recognisable.
As an example, here is a monospaced font with a situation like I described. Check the W and M for one solution to the not-enough-pixels issue. I and T suffer from spacing issues:
Considering we do have more space to use within those potential max 5+1 pixels, we could certainly try and give some letters a bit more breathing space. But that would only be true if the character limit is actually set by the M, which I doubt. See more below. I would also differentiate the O and the 0, either by making the O wider or by “slashing” the 0. For the : , we could always try to force more space within the glyph itself and then get rid of the spaces to the sides of it in code. I am not sure how the empty pixels defined to the sides of each character on the font is truncated by the library.
We could also start completely from scratch and use 4+1 pixels per character, though that would give us at most 3 more characters per line if the M theory is correct (which I think is not). I can currently fit 19 M across, which gives me 114 pixels of space in total. With 5 pixel wide characters we could fit 22. Not a huge gain. And legibility would definitely suffer.
Odd enough, I get 29 periods until teletype stops printing more on screen. Which makes me think the limit is not based on how many of the widest character one can fit on a line.
Anyway, I would gladly help make any modifications. I have to say I quite like the Liquid fonts, they manage to get decent legibility and a fair amount of personality with limited resources. And the lowercase is lovely too. But there is always space for improvement, especially when taking into account specific needs and uses.
Apologies for the long text.
Cheers,
José
