191–195 of 195 posts
It's hard for me to imagine ever finding anything better than Ubuntu Mono, but for those who haven't found a love of their font-life, now might be a helpful time to relink to the one slant article I ever saw: http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming...
Seconded. I used to use Menlo, then Incosolata. Ubuntu Mono is by far the absolute best available for programming. Love it!
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http://www.twoevils.org/html/files.html has 6x13 in TrueType format, which I'm using for Windows console and Sublime Text.
Also PuTTY's author, Simon Tatham, has provided 6x13 since forever: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/fonts/ I've put 9x15 for Windows here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19746944/cheever.fon (I can't remember how I got it)
I think I even found some unicode support in one or two at some point (technically impossible with the Windows bitmap font formats), but I can't seem to find any right now, bah.
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What about the difference in use? Do you know of any work that examines whether there is a difference in the importance of attributes depending on whether it's for programming or reading? I know different things are important to me when viewing programming text than reading. A simple, somewhat contrived example would be whether 'r' and 'n' together are easily discernible as 'rn' or 'm' (which is mostly a non-problem…
You read code when you're programming. The only difference is the mix of characters you'll see near each other. General readability matters -- when is it OK for a regular font to be unclear about which character (a zero or 'O') you're looking at? The 'rn' case is one of kerning, and is an issue independent of the mono- or proportional-ness of the font; it's one of kerning. You can have 'r' and 'n' at full width for t…
Right, but not for comprehension the way you read prose, but for technical accuracy of an input to a mechanical system that will read it and which is intolerant of errors even when the meaning is clear from context. For human consumption of prose, fonts that can sometimes create ambiguities of individual characters that are easily resolved from context but which keep the overall shape of morphemes recognizable are mostly fine, for creation of content -- particular content to be read by a machine, they are not.
> General readability matters -- when is it OK for a regular font to be unclear about which character (a zero or 'O') you're looking at?
For readers, quite a bit, because for most purposes, the meaning is clear from context (same with 1/I/l), and because people with more than marginal literacy mostly are recognizing the visual shape of (approximately) whole morphemes, not individual characters.
> If you have 'rn' looking like 'm', it's just as awful when you're reading a novel as when you're reading code.
For the reasons stated above, that's not really true.
"but a font by a programmer makes as much sense as a database library by a font designer." "a bridge for pedestrians, by a pedestrian". I wonder why when a designer kind of guy tries to get into programming he generally gets encouraged and when a programmer tries to do some artsy/design stuff he gets slammed down ?
"I wonder why when a designer kind of guy try to get into programming he generally gets encouraged and when a programmer tries to do some artsy/design stuff he gets slammed down ?" Because, despite frequent claims to the contrary, this industry/community/profession is actually pretty damn inclusive.
It's hard for me to imagine ever finding anything better than Ubuntu Mono, but for those who haven't found a love of their font-life, now might be a helpful time to relink to the one slant article I ever saw: http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming...
I'm not sure I'd care to code with this: http://i.imgur.com/Pu4FHi4.png I like to code with about a 9 point font, in order to maximize the amount of code per screen without going too far into the illegible. At that size, the proportions of even a single pixel are large enough to make any anti-aliasing annoying. You lose the sharp contrast that every good font needs to have along its edges. Bitmap fonts are my favorit…
Mine too. Dina is my font of choice for now, also because it does a good job "to maximize the amount of code per screen without going too far into the illegible", among other things. If you code just with ASCII, maybe you'd like to try it if you haven't already.