Mt. Molelog

Some Decent Monospaced Faces

My Courier gripe seems to have hit a nerve.

Besides the faces I mentioned there as being decent (Lucida Typewriter and Luxi Mono) or good (Neep), there are some other monospaced faces good for various uses.

Andale Mono aka Monotype.com is a reasonably good web/terminal font for general use; it was one of Microsoft's freely distributed faces that no longer are. Apple's monospaced face Monaco also falls into this category.

Faces designed specifically for programmers generally emphasize punctuation, especially the braces, parenthesis and brackets that are relatively unimportant in normal text; they're also likely to go through some effort to make sure that 'l', '1' and 'i' are easily distinguished, as well as '0', 'o' and 'O'. The better of them will also strongly differentiate forward quotes from back quotes, and the ones designed for m4 coders will make them essentially mirror images of each other.

As I already mentioned, I use and love neep; it's very legible at small sizes and not only legibile but very attractive at large sizes; it also includes bold and italic versions of most sizes, easiy distinguished from the roman version, while still fitting within the same grid (this is something some of 'monospaced' faces not really intended for terminal use don't even attempt).

ProFont inspires similar loyalty; Sheldon is now used by some people who gave up waiting for Profont to become available for OS X.

Oloron is another face designed to meet the same essential needs; I think the excessive weight given to the punctuation characters would distract me more than help me, but others might care for it.

Anonymous looks readable but not particularly attractive.

This review covers some of these and some others as well. This catalog looks to be obsessively complete (and I mean that with much much respect, of course).

2003-06-08 20:44:00 | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) | Computers::Typography