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Programming Fonts – Test Drive

app.programmingfonts.org

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Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#101

Post by teddyh »

int_19h wrote: post #69
valtism wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to know how you started using proportional fonts for coding. All of the tooling for writing code defaults to monospace, so what started you coding in a different style?

One of the early proponents of using proportional fonts for code was Bjarne Stroustroup - his "The C++ Programming Language" books all do that, and he briefly explains it in the intro as being more readable, and urges the readers to give it a go. I wasn't convinced, personally, but the idea was already around then.

The Smalltalk system also used proportional fonts, and predates that book by many years.

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#102

Post by teddyh »

ww520 wrote: post #38
Stratoscope wrote: post #26

It looks like these are all monospaced fonts. I realize that most programmers use monospaced fonts, but I personally find proportional fonts to be much more readable and pleasing to my eye. I would be really interested in a similar font comparison that included proportional fonts that are suitable for programming. Right now my favorite is Trebuchet MS. This renders beautifully on the high-DPI displays I use, and it h…

Curious. How do you line things up?

I would suggest that using elastic tabstops¹ is the only reasonable system for doing that. Sadly, the industry seems to be stuck in a local maxima where the simultaneous jump to both using proportional fonts (which would be better) and using elastic tabstops for alignment (which would be easier), constitutes too large of a distance to bridge in a single leap, and either one by itself isn’t worth the effort.

Of course, if you already have made one of these two jumps, it should be a no-brainer to make the other one as well.

1. http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#106

Post by himanshumuj2050 »

int_19h wrote: post #65
me551ah wrote: post #44

I'm surprised that the list doesn't mention consolas. It ships default with visual studio and it's so good that I use it on arch Linux as my terminal font and with intellij. It was designed with programming in mind and has some nifty characteristics like a slash through zero. This list also misses out on 'operator mono' which is a well thought out font for programming.

Consolas ships with Windows itself since Win7.

ebfuefbeuf

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#107

Post by [deleted] »

chrismorgan wrote: post #29

My favourite for a few years now is a commercial font, Triplicate. It’s a true serif monospace font; every other monospace font I’ve encountered that is labelled “serif” is actually a slab serif. It has a proper italic face as well, which is a less rare, but it’s a functional italic face rather than ornamental. It comes with some interesting variants, most notably Poly which is not fully monospaced, adjusting the wid…

[deleted]

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#108

Post by lispm »

martijn_himself wrote: post #99

I don't own a Mac at the minute but I must say Monaco is hands down the best programming font I've worked with. Most of the fonts on this list don't even come close.

Apple long ago chose 'Menlo' and it now uses in some applications (Xcode, Terminal) the font 'SF Mono'.

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#109

Post by Luc »

fermienrico wrote: post #87
maksimum wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$99 for a font... Seems like the artisinal font industry gets its business model from free-to-play, i.e. whale-hunting.

Do yourself a favor and try to design a font from scratch using FontForge (free tool). Let us know what you learn from the experience, how long it took to perfect it and what was the end result.

Still quite a bit easier than creating a F2P game to those same standards.

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#110

Post by javajosh »

klageveen wrote: post #88
fermienrico wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always use a static .svg or .png in place.

That's what I feature on the blog, but you'll notice the right-hand side of app.programmingfonts.org is interactive. That's kinda hard to do with static images ;)

Would it violate the ToS to create a simple sprite sheet out of a proprietary fixed-width font?
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