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I'm surprised Liberation Mono[1][2] (similar to the Deja Vu font) is not on the list or the bitmap font, Dina[3]. I end up using Liberation Mono much more nowadays (which is similar to Dina), since bitmap fonts don't have support in a lot of development tools and Dina has no real UTF-8 support. However, Dina was my first real "programming font" I used and still love it where I can use it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

[2] https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/

[3] http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/




Hey man, feel free to add it! (the entire site is collaboratively written)


Will do :)

I just found it surprising no one else had added them already.


How is it better than Menlo, also based on Deja Vu?


It's hard for me to give you an exact comparison (because I'm not an OSX user and have never used Menlo), but I can give you an idea based on a comparison to Deja Vu (on both Linux and Windows 7). Some of my reasons are preference (what looks better) and some are factual (like spacing).

Liberation Mono is a more vertically compact font, but I consider it just as readable as Deja Vu. I can fit around 7 more lines on my 1920x1200 monitor with 13pt Liberation versus 12pt Deja Vu. Deja Vu just takes up way more space than it needs to and (my opinion) does not make it anymore readable than Liberation or Dina.

I generally dislike anti-aliasing/smoothing on fonts when writing code in certain editors/ides (looking at you Intellij Idea). I don't mind it elsewhere, but Java just sucks at rendering fonts with its generic anti-aliasing scheme. Since I dislike it in Intellij and I use their IDE quite a bit for Android/Java, Python, JavaScript or PHP, I disable the Java anti-alias setting and most fonts tend to look bad that way as they're designed for smoothing.

Liberation though looks great with little to no distortion even without anti-aliasing enabled. I would have stuck with Dina (similar to it) since bitmap fonts do not get smoothed out by the OS or IDE, but many editors do not support bitmap fonts and the lack of UTF-8 support with Dina is a letdown as well. It's still a great font, just the tools I use end up being more important than the font itself.

Compared to Deja Vu, Liberation has less distortion glyphs without smoothing enabled and much more readable. The real downside to Liberation Mono is the 0 has just a dot in the center of it instead of a full slash unlike Menlo (doesn't bother me as I can see it, but I would prefer a slash).

Just for reference and because pictures give a better idea than my own preferences, here's a comparison:

Deja Vu 12pt: http://imageshack.us/a/img543/9845/dejavu12.png

Deja Vu 12pt (no font smoothing): http://imageshack.us/a/img547/858/dejavu12noaa.png

Liberation Mono 13pt: http://imageshack.us/a/img43/691/liberation13.png

Liberation Mono 13pt (no font smoothing): http://imageshack.us/a/img708/6315/liberation13noaa.png




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