Issues with geometric shapes

[moyogo]

The regular geometric shapes should have the same visual impact.
Unicode also provides some large square or circles, medium squares, small squares, triangles or circles.
See http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr25/

The geometric shapes ■◆◉ \25A0\25C6\25C9 are way too small for regular size in Source Sans Pro, they should match the sizes of the following regular triangles.
▲△▶▷▼▽◀◁ \25B2\25B3\25B6\25B7\25BC\25BD\25C0\25C1 could be a bit bigger as well.
It’s less clear for ❒ \2752 what size it should have.

[pauldhunt]

will be improved in next release.

[adrientetar]

Why do geometric shapes have to be that big? It you look at how they are used in typesetting e.g. for dictionaries (see below), they need to have at most ~ height of capital letters (this is the case with Hoefler fonts Mercury & Chronicle, for instance – or Collins Fedra).

[moyogo]

This is what the glyphs mentioned look like in 1.050:

This is what the glyphs mentioned look like in 2.010:

All the geometric shapes are now much larger and are so in a consistent manner. This matches their design in Source Han Sans fonts.

@adrientetar the black square in your example is closer to x-height than cap-height.

[adrientetar]

I think Source Serif Pro does it right:

I don't use Source Han Sans, the only thing I can say is that the current geometric symbols of Source Sans Pro just seem too large to be used in Latin publications. @pauldhunt @frankrolf

[pauldhunt]

I’ll look at this again. It will help to know what the common use cases for these are in Western publications.

[adrientetar]

The Mercury Text specimen slider presents some examples of uses.

Square is often used as end of paragraph mark, as list or overall decorative marker.

Some fonts even include variants of squares, diamond and circles fitted to the xheight as my example from a previous comment shows. Had a thread about this – FF Franziska has some fuss in this domain too.

These marks are used in running text so they imo shouldn't be larger than capitals.

[moyogo]

Based on "End Marks" and the illustration in https://books.google.com/books?id=dEbaAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT215 it should probably be enough to reduce the size of ■ 25A0 BLACK SQUARE and the likes a little bit and add ▪ 25AA BLACK SMALL SQUARE, ◼ 25FC BLACK MEDIUM SQUARE and some others.

[adrientetar]

The current black square of Source Sans Pro looks more like U+2B1B than U+25A0.

[erniemarch]

These have noticeably changed size in 3.006