

Apple Menlo: Snow Leopard's New Console Font - tptacek
http://typophile.com/node/58625#comment-351070

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tptacek
Yawn.

Compare to Prelude, an entire sans serif _family_ Palm commissioned from Font
Bureau: <http://typophile.com/node/58935>

First Microsoft, now _Palm_ ; Apple, you really need to raise your game here.

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Kejistan
Sorry, I don't understand the comparison? How does Prelude have much to do
with Apple's 'new' terminal font? And how does Microsoft play into this?

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tptacek
Apple has famous typographic literacy and graphic design taste.

But Microsoft, with a far worse reputation for taste, has employed famous
typographers for each major release of its OS, contributing serious, important
typefaces. Vista included Lucas de Groot's Calibri and Consolas, for instance.

Even Palm, a relatively minor company, has a real face commissioned for the
Pre.

But Apple's new typeface is just a tweak of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono,
_Linux's_ open source monospace sans?

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MrRage
The major difference, as I see it, is that Apple includes fonts that are good
for publishing, and Microsoft includes fonts that are good for reading on a
screen. For example, Consolas is designed for a screen with sub-pixel
rendering.

I think this difference is apparent in how fonts are rendered on OS X and
Windows, i.e. Windows "snaps" fonts to pixel grids for readability.

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tptacek
What's the important print face Apple has released in the last decade? What
have they done since Hoefler Text?

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kevbin
Menlo is nice. I use it as the default in Xcode, Terminal, and Safari under
10.6. It looks to have been tweaked from Bitstream Vera Sans for Quartz's
anti-aliasing—like Consolas was tweaked from TheSansMono for Cleartype. The
letter forms in TheSansMono are the most beautiful—if you're printing a
program listing or samples for a book buy and use TheSansMono—Consolas is the
sharpest, easiest to read on Windows LCDs, but looks funny on Macs; Menlo is
clearer and easier to read on Macs than Consolas. If you want to use the same
font set on Mac, Windows, Linux, et al, the Liberation fonts are the best
plan; Liberation Mono is pretty, consistent, and doesn't morph too much
between renderers.

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dflock
The Droid family from Ascender, which Google commissioned for Android is
uniformly excellent, renders well everywhere I've seen it and is Apache
Licensed. I'm currently using 'Droid Sans' as a system UI font (on Linux) and
'Droid Sans Mono' for coding, terminals, etc... In fact I've just aliased the
linux 'sans', 'mono', etc... to the appropriate Droid face.

More info here, including the link to the git repo if you want to check the
fonts out: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_fonts>

these are in the Ubuntu repo's as 'ttf-droid' or you can do a straight
download from here:

[http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-font-family-
courtes...](http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-font-family-courtesy-of-
google-ascender)

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kevbin
I think Droid and Liberation are siblings, from the same designer & foundry.
Liberation has more variations (italic, bold italic) and more "flourishes"
(like in the uppercase Q, lowercase a and what not).

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TrevorJ
I like the fact that Apple was willing to tweak something in a fairly minor
(from the outside) way in order to make it work just that much better.

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lamnk
For console fonts nothing beats Terminus, period.

<http://www.is-vn.bg/hamster/>

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tdavis
FWIW, I found Pragmata to be a solid investment; best console font I've used.

<http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm>

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quizbiz
What is the blue/red?

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TrevorJ
He's overlaying the two fonts to compare the differences.

