
Mensch -- A coding font - stesch
http://robey.lag.net/2010/06/21/mensch-font.html
======
baddox
It looks fine, but I think I'll always have trouble finding a coding font to
replace Consolas.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas>

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ihodes
I love Consolas, but Inconsolata (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconsolata>)
is a nice, friendly, take on it. I'd check it out if you haven't already–it's
what I now use exclusively!

~~~
baddox
Just tried it out on Windows 7 with ClearType (same settings I use with
Consolas). I don't know if there's a problem with the way ClearType is
rendering the font or what, but it looks terrible on my system. Is ClearType
supposed to be disabled or what?

Screenshots:

11pt <http://i.imgur.com/Weq4G.png>

12pt <http://i.imgur.com/L4UDZ.png>

~~~
lut4rp
Yes, it will look weird because Consolas was designed specifically for
ClearType (which is why it looks nowhere as good on OS X). Inconsolata was
designed without it.

Similarly, Monaco doesn't look half as good on Windows :) Text rendering
differs on OS X and Windows.

~~~
Terretta
I'm on OSX, and suggest some alternatives to Consolas above:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454649>

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jws
I don't know, typing two zeroes in a row gets a little eyeballey.

And, unrelated, if you are thinking the serif font for the prose on that page
looked like some ghastly font from the early days of printing. It is!

 _Legitima is the digital revival of a typeface used in Cicceide Legitima, a
book written by Francesco Lazzarelli and printed in Venice, ca. 1694._

To be fair, Legitima is designed to work in smaller sizes and going smaller
than the 19pt on the page makes it look much better.

~~~
commandar
Personally, I found myself wondering why I'd want to use a font from somebody
that cared little enough about readability to use a font like that on their
webpage.

~~~
jsharpe
You have to use some type of font smoothing (e.g. ClearType) for it to look
acceptable. It looks quite nice once you put it on.

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makmanalp
Almost every single one of his replacements hurts my eyes. The 0 I like, the 1
looks like it was chopped from the left, the z-3 is ugly, the and sign could
have been nice but the top part is too small and off to the left, the Q's tail
looks abominable, and those angle brackets look as large as Cleopatra's nose.

Maybe it's just me. To each his own I guess!

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nezumi
Looks nice, although the changes are given away by hinting problems on my
Linux box:
[http://ploader.net/files/92540a2c2b68cfe8b49f2301f628f860.pn...](http://ploader.net/files/92540a2c2b68cfe8b49f2301f628f860.png)
(I've no idea what it would take to fix this but I can provide more info about
the system on request.)

Here's a nice oddball coding font for you:
<http://www.dafont.com/monofur.font>

~~~
jfr
Was it installed during that preview? If the font isn't installed, the font
viewer can't do the hinting.

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darrenkopp
A great font i've been using is envy code r.

[http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-
preview-7-cod...](http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-
preview-7-coding-font-released)

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shaddi
I tried it out on my Ubuntu box and realized it's practically
indistinguishable from the default Monospace font:

<http://sha.ddih.org/f/monospace.png>

<http://sha.ddih.org/f/mensch.png>

~~~
sambeau
Your mensch.png shows up the problem with making > too big:

-> no longer looks like an arrow.

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augustl
The changed l (letter) looks a lot like 1 (number). Perhaps someone using the
font can confirm or deny this?

~~~
MartinCron
From the article:

 _I think the original artist drew the L weirdly to make it extremely clear
that it’s not a one, but if you draw a gothic one, the difference is obvious
even with a simpler L._

~~~
zb
And that might be fine if you see an l and a 1 next to each other and you want
to know which is which. In the real world where you see one or the other and
want to know which it is, this is really unhelpful.

~~~
delackner
Indeed I have not yet seen a monospaced font that distinguished l (el) and 1
(one) meaningfully. Hell the font I am typing with in the compose field
differs by perhaps one pixel.

~~~
zb
Well, as you can see from the article, Menlo does. Monaco is also very similar
in this respect.

Even if you're not on a Mac it shouldn't be difficult to find one or two.

~~~
delackner
Would have privately replied (as this thread is a bit old now) but no contact
details so:

On my iMac I find that Menlo has a very subtle fuzziness to its characters.
Monaco (10pt) remains my setting for now. Despite being not very pretty, it is
very crisp and the letters (aside from l and 1) are very distinct and legible.

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drivingmenuts
the angle brackets seem to point a little high. probably because they are not
weighted evenly from top to bottom.

~~~
bodhi
I agree. I'd say it's because they are balanced across the total height of the
font, rather than the x-height.

Sitting next to capital letters or numbers it would probably look ok, but that
size dwarfs the lower-case letters.

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Amnon
I tried it in Visual Stdio and noticed this font has ligatures. as between f
and i in the word "specified". It looks horrible in a fixed width font since
the other letters are separated from each other. Additionally, somehow Visual
Studio treats the letter pair as a single letter, so you can only select or
erase the pair as whole. Not very usable.

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rudd
I don't have Menlo on this computer (still on Leopard), but from what I can
tell from comparing this font to my current coding font, Droid Sans Mono, they
must be very similar. It's okay, but it looks like all the things that annoy
me about Mensch are the things that were changed from Menlo!

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chmike
I also prefer the dot in the zero. But the l shape is too close of the number
1. The original font is better on this regard. There is more space between the
dot and the bar in the exclamation mark which makes it more different of
avertical bar.

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mildweed
Panic Sans is also a similar, good coding font.

[http://vnoel.wordpress.com/2007/04/25/coda-coding-font-
panic...](http://vnoel.wordpress.com/2007/04/25/coda-coding-font-panic-sans/)

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cabalamat
The l looks too much like a 1. This is a big no-no on fonts to be used for
programming. (As is making sure 0 and O are distinct.)

Also, angle brackets look too similar to parentheses -- <> (). Here's some
source code that would look terrible in this font:

    
    
          (if (< item x) 
             (<< lessx item) 
             (<< gex item)))

~~~
fragmede
Really? <http://imgur.com/OaonC.png>

~~~
cabalamat
That's curious.

The angle brackets on this png are fine, unlike on the examples on the
original page.

I've just downloaded Mensch, and on my box too the angle brackets are fine,
with an angle between the lines of about 55 degrees, as opposed to about 85
degrees on the original page; so it would appear the downloadable font is
different from that described no the page.

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rkalla
I got a kick out of the post, how he starts off with the intent of fixing the
"0" and then I quick-scrolled down to the screenshot and noticed there were a
lot more corrections than just the "0" -- that's totally something I would
have done too once I had the font opened in an editor :)

Either way, really like the widened GT and LT chars for coding, thanks!

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fredoliveira
I like most of the changes, and I am definitely going to try it out (I'm using
Inconsolata and must say I love it quite dearly). There's one thing I can say
I don't like about Mensch, however, and that is the lowercase "q". It is very
close to an "a" or "alpha". Reading "query" in the rendered example feels
wrong.

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chopsueyar
No more fakakta zeroes.

You sir, are a mensch.

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BoppreH
Does it handle latin 1 and 2 characters? á é í à ã õ ô, etc

~~~
ars
The original DejaVu Sans Mono it's based on does, so I would guess this does
too.

In fact DejaVu includes pretty much all of unicode.

~~~
jacobolus
It’s not based on DejaVu Sans Mono. It’s based on Bitstream Vera Sans Mono,
which doesn’t have nearly as many glyphs as DejaVu Sans Mono.

~~~
ars
That's not what the article said.

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tedreed
In the rendered example, the dot in the zero is too low.

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sandGorgon
I use Monofur on my terminal and Anonymous Pro for my editor (distributed
under the Open Font License)

Anonymous Pro includes embedded bitmaps for specific sizes.

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chrismealy
Nice work. I'm going to use it.

Good lord, we programmers are spoiled.

~~~
rnicholson
I like to use 'particular' instead

~~~
confuzatron
'reading HN and changing our programming fonts, instead of programming'.

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compay
I'm always impressed by people who know how to code, and also have a good
understanding of the subtleties of typography. Bravo!

~~~
jacobolus
This guy clearly _doesn’t_ understand the subtleties of typography, given some
of the edits he’s made to this font.... that’s okay though, because if he
likes it better and it works for him, everyone’s still happy.

~~~
compay
Well, I guess you can just count me in the "knows how to code" camp. :) I know
very little about typography but find the subject pretty interesting.

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plaes
I'm using terminus font: <http://www.is-vn.bg/hamster/>

~~~
aerique
Same here. I always come back to this font after a safari through font country
looking for alternative programming fonts. I really like the 'square' look.

I've tried most other fonts for a while and DejaVu Sans Mono for the longest
time because it supports so many of the unicode characters, but I really don't
need them when programming (or doing most other things on the computer, but
then I come from a region where the default ASCII set is almost good enough).

~~~
nuxi
Have you tried SGI screen? It's a bitmap font (ASCII-only), great for small
sizes (if that's your cup of tea). <http://imgur.com/9xJlN.png>

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aquateen
Cromulent use of the word 'embiggen'.

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zavulon
I would definitely write the whole blog post in this font.

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cracki
the example does not show his "improvements" on the 1-digit/L-letter shapes...

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ars
I like it, except for the 3.

