Comments on: Droid Sans Mono, a sweet monospace font

By: 5000!

5000! — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Another vote for Anonymous, which was designed by type designer extraordinaire Mark Simonson:

http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html

Envy Code R looks appealing, though. Interested in checking it out.

By: Ralph Giles

Ralph Giles — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cory@27: Well, gedit certainly gets more love. I use it occassionally when I have lots of cut-and-paste work to do, but normally write everything in nano in a terminal. People used to roll their eyes at this, but since it's only of the official "favorite editor" options on the LCA registration two years running, I know I'm not alone!

By: rfquerin

rfquerin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

My fave at the moment for both terminal work and for programming stuff has to be ProggyCleanTT. It's a bitmap font (and therefore not rescalable) but man is it ever clear and well designed at its designated point sizes. Proggyfonts.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Droid Family Font was fixed to be fully under the Apache License.

Reference: https://review.source.android.com/Gerrit#change,5401

By: fatcat1111

fatcat1111 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Regeya@41, Inconsolata is basically a reproduction of Consolas, but without many of its features and about half of its glyphs. You might want to check it out some time, if your OS supports ClearType.

Thanks for turning me on to Vibrant Ink. I just tried it and it’s easy on the eyes (I don’t like the feeling of staring in to a light bulb for hours on end, like I get with a white background) while remaining readable.

By: nanite2000

nanite2000 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nice font, but it looks so very similar to “Lucida Console” which is my personal favourite for all programming. The 2 main drawbacks of this new font however are (1) No bold, and (2) no italics. This makes it practically useless for most development programs (like Notepad++) that make heavy use of bold and italics! :-(

By: Will

Will — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Courier 12 pt. is my favorite for writing. It’s gotta have a serif, and it’s gotta be monospace. Anything else distracts my ear-eye. I’ve always found that for creative writing, the typeface and program you use has as much impact on the story as the room and town in which you work. Just like some stories feel “Boston” while others could have been written anywhere– there’s no reliable correlation, except that some pieces I write just feel “word processed”.

Honestly, I’ll never get over Word for MS-DOS, ’cause that’s how I learned.

By: tim

tim — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been programming in Smalltalk for 25 years but I can’t imagine why you would use a monospace font when writing software. What virtue(s) would you claim it has?

By: Slab64

Slab64 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

fixedsys 4 lyfe

By: Shrdlu

Shrdlu — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Good grief. This spawned a discussion? Cory Doctorow’s font preferences?

This is truly the end of civilization.

By: chrisphin

chrisphin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I can understand why monospace fonts make sense for programming, but I’m curious to know why you prefer one for all writing. I’ve tried it, and I find traditional variable width faces much more natural and easy to read, I assume because the overwhelming majority of the written word I consume is presented in this way.

By: Fortyseven

Fortyseven — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

#1: Not to mention 0 and O look nearly identical.

By: Andrew W

Andrew W — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The “o” and “0″ bug me a bit, too.

Here’s a great review of monospaced fonts: http://www.lowing.org/fonts/

I use Anonymous alot when coding. My other fave is Deja Vu, which is licensed in a fashion that would appeal to Cory! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts

I like fonts that look good when they’re big. My eye site is the pits in the wee hours, and I like to crank my font size ridiculously high.

By: l0k1

l0k1 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

if the O and 0 get fixed i’ll use it. i’m using consolas at the moment but i do prefer to have zeroes with the slash, or at least a dot or something, or broad O’s and very elliptical 0′s either works for me.

By: Ralph Giles

Ralph Giles — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Tim@34: Near as I can tell, it means you don’t have to fix your coding practice (and editor) to not indent in a combination of tabs and spaces.

On a related note, I’m also still waiting for a terminal that can use proportional fonts…

By: saehn

saehn — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

http://www.dafont.com/font.php?file=bitstream_vera_mono

Free (public domain), Zero/’o’ distinguishable, bold, italics.

By: TwoShort

TwoShort — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Tim @34:
My coding is in C++, and I do strongly prefer a monospace font. Sometimes successive lines of code can be made clearer by making them line up vertically in nice ways. But I’ll be the first to admit that’s an only-occasionally edge case. Monospace for code is mostly just habit. What mystifies me is the people saying they need bold & italics for code; I’ve never seen that. For me, code is monospace, albeit in a rainbow of colors.

By: Kieran O'Neill

Kieran O'Neill — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hey! Pre-empted. I’ve been using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono for some time now.

Interestingly, the font review site posted above (the lowing.org one) rates it the highest, too.

By: mikesum32

mikesum32 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

JPEG files are blurry and lossy. Use lossless PNG next time, please.

Thanks.

-the internet

By: Michael R. Bernstein

Michael R. Bernstein — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cory, I’m not sure exactly what functionality you’re looking for, because from what I can tell, gedit doesn’t have what you describe either.

Can you explain what it is you need?

By: fatcat1111

fatcat1111 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I live in my IDE, and IMO the very best monospace font is Consolas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas).

This one has it all:
* uppercase-sensitive forms;
* sub and superscripts;
* arbitrary fractions (well, my editor doesn’t care about those, but it’s still cool);
* most importantly: it’s ClearType enabled, and when it’s on this is about smoothest font there is. With the resolution at 1600×1200 it’s like reading a finely printed book.

Tim, I think that many coders use monospace fonts because it makes the number of spaces clear (you might not see two spaces in a proportional font, but your compiler will if whitespace is significant) and because continuation lines don’t line up when your statement is longer than the width of your editor.

Also the proportional fonts tend to place the braces tightly. If you use the One True Brace Style, seeing “}}}}}}}” at the end of a line in Times New Roman will immediately give you a headache. And don’t even try counting them.

By: Kyle Armbruster

Kyle Armbruster — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@#3:

Although I most certainly can’t speak for Mr. Doctorow, but whenever I’ve done any kind of creative writing for things I’ve been involved in, and when I do research writing now, I write in Courier New with basically no formatting but carriage returns.

I got the idea from some MacWorld article a million years ago about the BeBox, and how the writer found he had done his best work on it with its poor word processing program. He said it didn’t allow his work to look finished and ready to go–fooling the eye into seeing great prose where there was none.

Ever since then I’ve done it, and I’ve found that, for me at least, that really rings true. If it sounds good with a monospace font and no formatting, then it actually sounds good.

My $0.02.

By: RugerRedhawk

RugerRedhawk — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Am I the only one who uses whatever shows up as default in the editor?

By: Tommy

Tommy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite coding font is Ti92Pluspc. Slashed zeros and a clear difference between the number one and a lower-case L make it a winner. It’s part of a TI-89/92 emulator, I think.

By: Silva

Silva — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

No love for ProFont?

By: Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I use monospace when writing because I’ve done it forever. If you’re going to do a “word count” for a short story market, you need to start with monospace layouts, since a “word” in that context is 1/250th of a letter-size page with 1″ margins, 1/2″ indents, and rag-right 12-pt Courier, double-spaced.

By: knifie_sp00nie

knifie_sp00nie — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does using mono-space for everything mean that you use two spaces after the period? If so, do you remove all those extra spaces when converting to a variable-width font?

The rules of typography are 2 spaces for mono and one space for variable after a period.

By: ia_

ia_ — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite font is the Quake 3 console font. Variable-width is easier to read, though.

By: sconover

sconover — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

How could you not be using

Deja Vu Sans Mono
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Image:Dejavu.png

The best monospaced font ever invented?

By: the_dannobot

the_dannobot — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I only use terminal. It’s the font that the windows cmd line uses, so when programming console apps it’s the only font where the code is WSIWYG.