
 Try PTMono, a beautiful monospace font that looks like serif   - tzury
http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/PT+Mono
======
bluekeybox
Just tried in my editor. At a size small enough to fit as many lines of text
on screen as I can with Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, PTMono letters look like
barely legible squiggles.

Still yet to find a font that competes with Menlo/Vera Sans Mono for coding on
a 900px-tall laptop screen. If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me
know.

~~~
m_for_monkey
My favorite is the 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)

I'm using it with full hinting enabled on Ubuntu/Xubuntu and it looks just as
nice as the Windows screenshots on the homepage.

~~~
bluekeybox
Thanks. I tried it out, and here's the thing about Envy: it's a horizontally
condensed typeface, which is good if your lines of code are very long (great
if you're a Java programmer and have to deal with names like
myAbstractFactoryClassMethodVerisonFive), but rather terrible if you're
someone like me who keeps his lines no longer than 80 characters and has a
habit of splitting his code windows into two or three vertical panels.

The idea is to fit as many lines of text _vertically_ , not to condense long
lines horizontally. Human vision has some sort of legibility tradeoff where
you can have letters that are either horizontally condensed but tall or
vertically condensed but short. I am looking for something of the second kind
for my main coding font.

~~~
christiangenco
Try dotsies: <http://dotsies.org/>

~~~
bluekeybox
Lol.

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revolvingcur
"Looks like serif"? Did you mean to say it looks like a proportional-width
font?

~~~
tomjen3
Yeah I don't think there is anything which prevents a font from being both
monospaced and serif (indeed it must be either san-serif or serif, right?)

~~~
pygy_
_> it must be either san-serif or serif, right?_

Not necessarily. This font is a monospaced hybrid of slab serif (fat serifs,
regular line width) and sans serif.

See here for details: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif>

~~~
illicium
To be fair, most monospaced typefaces are at least to some degree slab serifs
to visually compensate for the extra horizontal space (eg. letters like "l"
and "i")

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mistercow
It's pretty overall, but the one character for which the illusion of
proportionality really breaks is the lower-case L, which consistently appears
to have a space after it.

~~~
cleverjake
could you provide a sample sentence that shows this? I don't get the same
impression.

~~~
ajp
If you look at the paragraph sample on the webfonts[1] page. you will see it.
Also, you could type words like 'flow' or 'follow' into the sample box to see
it next to other fonts. This really highlights the extra space on the 'l'
glyph.

[1]<http://www.google.com/webfonts>

~~~
cleverjake
ah. I only really notice it in multiple L's. It uses the openfont license
though. Which means you can legally crack it open using fontforge and adjust
the kerning, and redistribute it as pt mono improved if youd like

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to3m
'J' is kind of gross. Not a big fan of 'L' and 't', either. And... seriously,
WTF is up with 'l'? Only a little goatse emoticon could be more vile. Sure,
tastes differ. And reasonable men may disagree. But not in this case ;)

For Mac OS X, I suggest Luxi Mono. It does a much better job of looking like a
reasonably-kerned proportional font.

For Windows, Lucida Sans Typewriter, with all antialiasing switched off. It
has a nice clean look to it, and it manages to avoid being too squat.

~~~
Leynos
I quite like the 'l' here. It solves the conundrum of how to differentiate the
'l' and '1' quite nicely.

I've so far stuck with Courier for monospace work (coding, console, etc), as I
find sans-serif fonts hard to read (this is also why I don't use web fonts).
I'll give this one a go for while and see how I get on.

~~~
to3m
The '1' vs 'l' point is a good one...

For many years, I used non-antialiased 9 point Courier New in Windows. This is
an ugly font at most other point sizes, but at 9 points it is strangely
attractive, and perfectly functional - except for '1' and 'l' being pixel-for-
pixel identical. Oh, and '0' and 'O' too...

The experience appears to have left me unconcerned about such minor quibbles
as being able to tell one glyph from another ;) (OK, so perhaps if '+' and '-'
looked the same, I'd have an issue with that.)

Nevertheless, I stand by my "vile" comment. I mean... c'mon. Just look at it.
What is this, Comic Sans? It's practically an offence against nature.

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losvedir
Why is coding so associated with monospace type? Has anyone tried using a
proportional-width typeface?

The vast majority of use-cases I can think of are simply allowing you to line
up the first letter of a line, or possibly an equals sign or something like
that. This seems like something a tab-stop or somesuch in the editor could
handle with ease, and shouldn't require sacrificing nice-looking text the rest
of the time.

~~~
DavidAbrams
Back in the day, a lot of programming revolved around reporting. One reason I
can think of would be laying out columns on reports, on terminals that didn't
support proportional fonts.

A lot of people rail against tabs; most of the time, these are people who
don't understand them or have never tried to use them.

You see this debate about tabs vs. spaces in code all the time, and I've yet
to hear any valid argument about why spaces are better (at least in any modern
context). But there is an obvious reason that tabs are better: It's much
easier to line things up, keep them aligned across different users' fonts, and
realign them if you change the text to cross a tab.

~~~
eropple
How quaint, another person who insists that people who don't use their
preferred formatting just doesn't _understand_ it! Never mind that maybe they
just _disagree_ \--there has to be something wrong with them, right?

I don't use tabs because of an _equally obvious_ reason that spaces are
better: because I end up padding with spaces because the tabs are too big. For
example, I like having horizontally consistent parameter argument lists, like
below:

    
    
       class Thing {
           def beep(bar: String, baz: Int, quux: Seq[String],
                    quuux: Map[String, String], quuuux: Int) = false
       }
    
    

If I tried to use tabs there, I'd be off by a space and have to add another
space. Someone with a different hard-tab width would then get mad because
there's an "extraneous" space in their view. And then we all have a nice big
slapfight and sound like your post in the process.

(Plus, my editor treats four spaces in a row as a soft tab anyway, so I don't
even notice it except when I want to. Life is peachy.)

~~~
DavidAbrams
I pointed out that they never give a specific reason for preferring spaces. At
least you did that.

You can still achieve what you want, and even faster, by using tabs to get
your subsequent parameter lines most of the way there and then padding with a
couple of spaces.

~~~
eropple
I covered that exact "solution" in my post--the exact one! It blows up when
somebody else is using a different tab width than I am. And given that I use
soft tabs, it is no faster at all.

------
ajp
I kind of wish there were explicit bold,italic, and bold/italic versions.

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fingerprinter
I was thrilled when Ubuntu released a font. The Ubuntu Mono font is my new
programming font everywhere. Make it the default in Sublime Text and you'll be
a very, very happy camper.

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pestaa
I think this is what I've been waiting for.

Ubuntu Mono is nice but my eyes are not really good at detecting soft curves,
I wanted something like Terminus[0] but with larger font sizes. (For some
reason, I was unable to go beyond 10px with Terminus on Vim.)

[0]: <http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/shots.html>

~~~
Cieplak
I highly recommend Inconsolata:

<http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html>

<http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Inconsolata>

~~~
brass9
Inconsolata is the poor mans version of the fantastic Consolas... alas, on
non-windows platform Consolas looks like shit.

Consolas comes for free with Visual Studio (probably pre-installed on Windows
7/Vista too)

Funny, inconsolata as well doesn't look that great on Windows...

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Consolas looks just fine on OS X. A licensed version of it comes with BBEdit.
The only curious thing about it I've noticed is that it requires good font
smoothing--unaliased, it looks absolutely horrible.

It's also one of the very few monospaced fonts I've seen that has a true
italic.

~~~
starwed
I think Ubuntu's monospace font has true italic? (I'm not a font expert,
though.)

<http://font.ubuntu.com/#charset-mono-regular-italic>

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abcd_f
Technically this is slab, not serif.

~~~
illicium
Slab serifs are still serifs.

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zokier
Looks very much like courier imho. Courier has bit more serifs, but the
letterforms seem similar. Not ugly, but distinctly monospaced

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mchahn
Did anyone else notice how low @ was placed. It is especially annoying when at
the beginning of a word like @word.

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xxqs
cool, this might be good for slideshows, especially on IT topics. I used
Ubuntu font in my latest slideshow, and it looked quite well

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DavidAbrams
Yay, CROSSBARS ON THE "I"!

Really, really tired of capital I's that look like lower-case L's. These
should be banished.

And the above is the only time an apostrophe makes a plural.

