

Programming fonts - s9w
http://s9w.github.io/font_compare/?rp

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pbnjay
Looks pretty neat! - Can you render the fonts at higher DPI? It doesn't look
good on a retina screen at all.

Ex: [http://i.imgur.com/HiclAPI.png](http://i.imgur.com/HiclAPI.png)

~~~
baldfat
When you say Retina you mean high dpi since retina is just a trade marked word
for dpi of 220 inches or higher and means different things at different
models.

Sorry to be a stickler but Retina is a worthless term and just causes
confusion.

~~~
CognitiveLens
To any non-tech person, "high DPI" is probably more likely to cause confusion
and is just as variable in definition. To (almost) any tech person, "retina"
is common enough that everyone knows what you're talking about.

Being trademarked doesn't really affect the meaning of a word once it's part
of popular parlance - Kleenex, Band-Aid, Hoover, Google...

~~~
baldfat
I disagree but I got down voted enough to guess people like the term???? It
makes zero seance. Your retina is the part of the eye that converts light into
signals for the brain. Your screen is a display and has nothing to do with
converting signals.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
It makes sense in the detail that it matches resolution. Our retina is the
fundamental limit to our visual resolution. Like the pixels on the screen.
Would it make more sense to call it a 'retina-matching monitor' instead?

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joonoro
Ah this has reminded me how awesome gdipp is [0]. For those who don't know,
it's an alternative renderer for Windows that makes the fonts look a lot
better. The only downsides are that it hasn't been updated in years and that
it breaks the font rendering in a few applications (notably Chrome and Skype).

[0] [https://code.google.com/p/gdipp/](https://code.google.com/p/gdipp/)

~~~
omgtehlion
This is a matter of choice I suppose.

For me gdipp (or mac ftm) rendered fonts look like just crap. Never been
typographic junkie though...

~~~
tuxracer
It also depends on the DPI of your display. The classic Windows font renderer
sacrifices accuracy for readability on low DPI displays. If the stroke of a
font was going to be 1.3 pixels wide at a given siW Windows will just crop the
extra 0.3 to give a crisp edge on low DPI displays. Unfortunately on HiDPI
displays this can needlessly make the font stroke very thin.

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jd3
Interesting project, but some of these look a bit... wrong to me. For example,
ProFont is my favorite bitmap programming font and the renderer used makes it
look bad. Just loaded it up in my Terminal.app to show how it /should/ look:
[0]. Also while I'm at it, some cool fonts not mentioned that I think deserve
some attention are tewi[1] and ProggyTiny[2]. Tewi glyphs are particularly
nice [3].

[0]: [http://i.imgur.com/3A0HEqu.png](http://i.imgur.com/3A0HEqu.png)

[1]: [https://github.com/lucy/tewi-font](https://github.com/lucy/tewi-font)

[2]:
[http://www.proggyfonts.net/download/](http://www.proggyfonts.net/download/)

[3]:
[https://rbt.asia/boards/g/img/0379/00/1383925217833.png](https://rbt.asia/boards/g/img/0379/00/1383925217833.png)

~~~
s9w
hmm in what way do you think it looks bad? I just double checked and the
screenshots on the page are correct. I can see that some letters (MN) are too
close together on the site. I'll try a different font version to see if that
fixes it.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll have a look and add them all if they work.
But my internet right now is damaged so it might take some time.

~~~
jd3
Yeah I think it was just the strange kerning and size that it was displayed
in. I know ProFont has bitmap sizes other than 9 (10, 12, 14, 24, etc.) but
I'm not accustomed to seeing any other than 9 used for programming is all.

I have a patched version of profont for windows that correctly supports the
powerline glyphs which I use in mintty. In the end, when I have everything
configured (ClearType disabled, MacType excludes mintty.exe), it looks exactly
like my above OS X screenshot.

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jdlyga
It's great that we have so many choices of great programming fonts nowadays.
What's everyone's font of choice? I've been using Consolas for the last few
years.

~~~
aidenn0
I've been using Bitstream/DejaVu Sans Mono for years as I really like their
choice for 1Il| but this page made it easy for me to find some alternatives to
try. Ubuntu mono and Monoid both stand out as looking good to me (M+ is a
close third, but has larger line spacing than I'm used to).

~~~
aidenn0
I don't know if you're still looking here, but after trying out the
alternatives, they all had things I didn't like. Source Code Pro was _nearly_
perfect for me, if the latin characters were only as tall as the non-latin
characters; the designer seems to like generous space between lines to the
point of even skimping on accent length for upper-case characters. The good
news is that it makes the Han characters much more legible, as they are larger
than the latin ones, but I never use those in my programming.

Looking at alternative fonts, I noticed that the designer of the Meslo font
considers Menlo (so also Bitstream/DejaVu) to be "too cramped," so my personal
preference must be fore closer-together lines than average.

Here's some samples from a directory listing:

[https://phab.jasom.org/orfiles/dejavu-sans-mono-
latin.png](https://phab.jasom.org/orfiles/dejavu-sans-mono-latin.png)

[https://phab.jasom.org/orfiles/dejavu-sans-mono-non-
latin.pn...](https://phab.jasom.org/orfiles/dejavu-sans-mono-non-latin.png)

[https://phab.jasom.org/orfiles/source-code-pro-
latin.png](https://phab.jasom.org/orfiles/source-code-pro-latin.png)

[https://phab.jasom.org/orfiles/source-code-pro-non-
latin.png](https://phab.jasom.org/orfiles/source-code-pro-non-latin.png)

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Tiksi
The subpixels on my screen aren't rgb (vbgr on this one) ordered, so the
images with AA don't quite work right for me. Annoyingly, quite a few
sites/applications make the assumption that everything is rgb, which causes
crappy looking text on my portrait screens, and even worse on my monitor at
home which is bgr ordered.

Also putting in a plug for my personal favorite font, Tamsyn (
[http://www.fial.com/~scott/tamsyn-font/](http://www.fial.com/~scott/tamsyn-
font/) ) Although firefox recently dropped support for bitmap fonts on linux,
and my ttf version of it only looks good at one size, so I've been trying to
find something to replace it in the browser.

~~~
s9w
I've never had contact with different subpixel configurations. So I have no
clue how to fix that. Any ideas?

I will add Tamsyn, thanks for the suggestion!

~~~
Tiksi
Well it wouldn't really be fixing it, but you could render the images with
different ordering and allow people to select. I'm not sure if there's a way
to detect it in browser. Setting the ordering depends on what os you're on. In
linux you can set it either with fontconfig and/or in whatever DE you use. In
windows I'm not aware of a way to specifically set the order, but it can be
changed with cleartype tuner. Osx I have no clue if you even can.

Example of bgr AA: [http://paste.click/fXuAWF](http://paste.click/fXuAWF)

It'll probably look wrong on your monitor, with red and blue fringing visible.
Thats what rgb ordered images look like to me.

I think it may be possible to specify AA with css, so that might be another
avenue, but I'm not sure.

I do like the idea of the site and appreciate all the effort.

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straws
Inconsolata-dz is a great font, though I recommend

[https://github.com/DeLaGuardo/Inconsolata-
LGC](https://github.com/DeLaGuardo/Inconsolata-LGC)

for fans of Inconsolata that would like bold and italic weights, as well as
extended glyphs.

~~~
s9w
This seems to be more or less identical with the -dz version as that already
contains bold and italics. So unless I'm missing something I don't think this
is necessary

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JoshTriplett
I've tried various programming fonts, and I keep coming back to DejaVu Sans
Mono. There are a few others that are as good, but none that seem so much
better to be worth getting used to.

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jasonkostempski
I use Terminus as my Linux terminal font and love it, however, I don't get to
use Linux much and it's hard getting Terminus to work anywhere else.

~~~
jryan49
Try [http://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/](http://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/)
?

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jryan49
Proves even further to me that Terminus is superior.

~~~
VLM
I agree with you, although I suspect many people confuse the clarity of
Terminus with AA being forced off because its a bitmap font. They really want
a non-AA display, and Terminus being bitmap forces the issue.

If you just shut off AA there are some fonts almost, but not quite, as good as
Terminus. Non-AA Ubuntu Mono is almost as good as Terminus. Non-AA Source Code
Pro is almost as nice as Terminus. Dejavu Sans Mono is almost as good as
Terminus.

The clarity and consistency of Terminus never fails to impress me. Other fonts
have like 25 good glyphs and at least one "whoops" usually a M or W or E.
Think of Monoid or the sad M in otherwise good Ubuntu Mono. Then again Ubuntu
mono is definable as a Terminus clone with a broken M. Or sometimes none of
the glyphs are individual disasters but the whole font has crazy variations,
think of the Meslos some verticals are double width very strange looking,
unreadable, looks like old fashioned ransom note.

I used an OCR font for awhile a couple years ago. Its not bad once you get
used to it. An ugly yet productive duckling. Easy to read does not necessarily
equal beautiful (with the exception of Terminus).

I have a suspicion that Terminus and buckling spring / model-M keyboard use
correlate, as a "will not accept anything but the absolute best" attitude.

~~~
marssaxman
I've never understood why some people dislike antialiased text rendering so
much. Aliased text is obviously inferior to my eyes - all the spurious
90-degree angles add meaningless noise to the character forms, as though the
font is decorated with a lot of extra fuzz. Antialiasing smooths all this
cruft away, leaving the character shape more clearly defined. And yet there
are people who dislike this look enough to disable it and work around it,
describing it as "blurry", though my experience is that it's _less_ blurry. I
really wonder what it is about their experience which differs so greatly from
mine.

~~~
to3m
With AA text on a normal-DPI LCD screen, it never feels like I'm focussed on
the screen properly. With no hard edges and no sharp corners, my eyes can't
seem to find the right setting. Whatever I do, it just always feels slightly
wrong. Blurry edges just don't make me think that something is smooth - they
make me think I haven't focussed properly. Drives me nuts.

I wouldn't mind so much, but over time people seem to keep taking the option
of a pixelly display away, and when anybody complains, they're told they don't
know what they're seeing through their own eyes.

Fortunately, AA text + retina display, I like, because the pixels are too
small for the blurriness to be visible, and things look sharp again. So roll
on more of that please. (High-DPI, I mean. Not AA. We have more than enough AA
to be getting on with.)

~~~
marssaxman
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

High-DPI displays are clearly the right long term solution. It was amazing to
use one for the first time - I couldn't see the individual pixels anymore, and
it was disconcerting in a really good way. It's like a bit of Hollywood fakery
brought to life.

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weinzierl
Excellent, I love it! Did you calculate the font size so that almost all lines
are equally long automatically? Why are some lines shorter?

I think Courier and Courier New would be good additions. They are terrible
programming fonts but for years were very widespread because they were very
often the default and still very often are the last resort fallback.

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xeonoex
I wish that more fonts had a semi-bold version, like Source Code Pro. It's one
of the main reasons I use that font, since it looks good at smaller sizes, but
still allows the syntax highlighting colors to stand out. You can tell the
difference between black and blue at a glance.

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theophrastus
Very useful! - but i'd humbly ask why any programming font set with a non-
struck zero would be associated with a green indicator, (e.g. Droid Sans Mono,
Luxi Mono). Perhaps the associated green/red don't mean what i think they
might?

~~~
s9w
The red/green are anti-alias indicator. They're stay red for bitmap fonts even
with AA toggled on to signal that they cannot be anti-aliased. Maybe I should
make that clearer

~~~
theophrastus
Thank you! Nice you highlighted comparison of little nasties like lowercase
"l" (ell) nearly indistiguishable from a "1" (one) (like "Envy Code R")
(horribly burnt by that in a Fortran program long ago with "k = l" instead of
desired "k = 1" (i didn't write that, just spend days of debugging it))

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tomswartz07
This is very useful!

I've been a big fan of Droid Sans Mono for the longest time, and my biggest
complaint was the lack of 'crossed' zeroes.

Roboto does have the crossed zeroes, but it seems a bit less crisp than Droid
Sans to me.

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psychometry
No Menlo?

~~~
s9w
I don't know if I am allowed to use it. It's from Apple, no?

~~~
joosters
From the Font Book application: (sorry for the formatting. EDIT: Hey, it sort
of worked!)

    
    
      Manufacturer	Bitstream
      Designer	Jim Lyles
      Copyright	Copyright © 2009 Apple Inc. Copyright ©  2006 by Tavmjong Bah. Copyright © 2003 by Bitstream, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
      Trademark	Menlo is a Trademark of Apple Inc.
      Description	Menlo is based upon the Open Source font Bitstream Vera and the public domain font Deja Vu. Bitstream Vera is a trademark of Bitstream, Inc., designed by Jim Lyles.
      Enabled	Yes
      Duplicate	No
      Copy protected	No
    

I don't know if that helps you or not? But presumably you can show images of
the font in any case.

~~~
s9w
Alright, well I should just do it and wait if something happens. I'll add it,
thanks!

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grigio
Nice! I'd like to change the default string to see how it renders in different
fonts

~~~
s9w
You mean change it dynamically on the site? I wouldn't know how that would be
possible. That would rely on browser rendering which is probably quite tricky
to get it to look exactly like in editors. Not even mentioning the hassle with
all the fonts and settings

~~~
JoshTriplett
One possibility: what if you used a version of libfreetype or similar,
compiled via emscripten, and run it on the client?

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bitwize
No Glass Tty VT220?

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pronoiac
Huh, this comes up blank in Mobile Safari.

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CognitiveLens
when i clicked on the link, i thought it might be an article about actually
programming the design of a typeface - generative glyphs! algorithmic
aesthetics! oh well... one day...

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buster
Why is Comic Sans missing?

