Adobe Releases New Openly Licensed Coding Font
tqft writes "From the sourceforge page: 'Source Sans is a set of monospaced OpenType fonts that have been designed to work well coding environments. This family of fonts is a complementary design to the Source Sans family.' License: Open Font License 1.1 (OFL 1.1) (both FSF and DFSG free). Hope to see it Debian (& other) repositories soon."
The example text doesn't really look too much better than Inconsolata. But, hey, who can complain about more liberally licensed fonts?
Actually accepted submission.
Fonts annoy me. So many licences, variability and availability and differences machine to machine. Like standards I suppose so many to choose from and non completely compatible.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
... but is this really better than good ol' Courier?
Personally, I find san-serif fonts a bit of a strain to read for long periods of time. For a while Lucida typewriter was fine but I keep switching back to Courier.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Am I the only person who thinks code looks better and is more readable with proportional font spacing? And am I the only person who really doesn't confuse O/0, l/I/1, or ./,? Granted, some of this comes from using a text editor with syntax highlighting, but these days, who doesn't? In my opinion we should leave monospaced fonts back in the dark ages of type writers with only 80 discrete positions per line of text, including for writing code. I know there is still the problem of aligning multiple columns of text, but this is enough of an edge case that I can really do without it, given the overwhelming readability advantages of proportional fonts.
We've already got plenty of good fonts for programming, and this doesn't actually look that good.
I've never found a better font than the windows raster fonts, that are used in cmd.exe by default. They are very well readable even in 6x8 size. I'm not aware about any font that could compete with that.
For the record, this font does *not* have Serif in its name (it's Source Code Pro).
Tried it. Hated it. Back to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 10pt in Zenburn.
How does this compare with Proggy Fonts, particularly the slashed-zero bold punctuation variant? That font was superb for legibility at a small font size, great for an at-a-glance overview of code without having to scroll.
Look, no SIG!
Install instructions send you to an Adobe web page which only mentions Windows and Mac. But it turned out that in Ubuntu 12.04, double-clicking the .ttf opens it in a font viewer with handy "Install" button.
Comparing the "Regular" version to DejaVu Sans Mono, they look very similar, except the the DejaVu is a bit "fatter".
The semi-bold version is bolder than the plain DejaVu, but also seems smaller.
For the lazy, this is the .zip content:
$ ls -Ago src/SourceCodePro_FontsOnly-1.009/
total 1132
-rwxr-xr-x 1 4622 Sep 21 02:12 LICENSE.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 4402 Sep 21 02:12 ReadMe.html
-rwxr-xr-x 1 79912 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Black.otf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 103764 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Black.ttf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 83792 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Bold.otf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 103512 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Bold.ttf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 76340 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-ExtraLight.otf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 104760 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-ExtraLight.ttf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 79940 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Light.otf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 104408 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Light.ttf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 10738 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodeProReadMe.html
-rwxr-xr-x 1 81384 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Regular.otf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 103820 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Regular.ttf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 81080 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Semibold.otf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 103500 Sep 21 02:12 SourceCodePro-Semibold.ttf
I don't like it - I'm sticking with Consolas for coding.
As far as I can tell, apart from the Adobe version of the small 'i' looking less attractive and their comma being more vertical, they are identical.
The ubuntu font was introduced last year.
I'm not sold on this being my new programming and terminal font just yet, but they've at least provided multiple weights to try. Whatever I use in OS X (Inconsolata normally) turns out looking fat and heavy. The lighter variants of Source Sans are a nice change from that.
It's personal taste, but I have yet to find a better font than Envy Code R (http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released) for source code editing.
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
Good ol' codepage 437 is what I use -- Hell, I'm making a fully 3D terminal emulator (it's for a game engine), and I'm just extruding the CP-437 bitmap.
No disrespect to the font designer, but as far as I can tell this is a long-solved solved problem.
Perhaps I'm a font curmudgeon, however I've not found anything that bests Schumacher Clean for everyday console and editor use. I've used it for about 15 years, and I've can't think of a single thing I don't like about it, other than it's a pain to make it and other bitmap fonts available under Ubuntu. It's been a standard part of X distributions for ages and thus it's widely available.
Schumacher Clean just makes me feel all warm and wubbly inside.
Cyrano de Maniac
Any time we can get high-quality hinted fonts for no charge is a good time.
Kriston
There, have I confirmed your prejudices now?
So, you revile good taste, consider love of beauty a weakness and "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!"
(Sorry to disappoint you by the way, but I never got beat up in high school, and I'm not obsessive, an interior decorator, an artist, celibate, gay, or an anonymous coward.)
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
It will not reach Debian main until Adobe releases their font build toolkit under a free license. Until they do that the font will have to live in contrib.
I prefer ProFont, but perhaps that's because I have a low-resolution screen (102ppi). I set up my console font for ProFont at size 8 (size 7 isn't quite clean enough for me). The "Source Code Pro" font has a taller line height at that size, and the dot on the 0 is pushed off to the left (and antialiased), which makes it harder to distinguish from O. ProFont gets around this by using a slash for 0, which is very obvious even at small sizes.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Somebody finally figured out that continuous underlining makes source code hard to read!
Aside from that, I'm not too impressed. Most features are comparable to other programmer-oriented fonts. But the zero is ugly.
Other than that, it is fine. But for me it is a deal breaker.
Looks a whole lot like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono / DejaVu Sans Mono (same letter shapes and very similar spacing), but lighter. I like the ExtraLight variant. The Light variant seems to have some kerning differences from ExtraLight, seems to be "rounded" differently, and looks somewhat wrong.
I tried this font but it's not a patch on [AnonymousPro], which has italics for a start and doesn't make mutt look like a grid of glyphs.
[AnonymousPro]: http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html
I keep going back to LMMono10 or Monaco. My reasons for preferring them over the others are the usual distinction between similar-looking letters like o, O, 0, i and so on. I use Monaco for the terminals because I prefer the slashed zero and the general look of Monaco. I use LMMono10 for gvim because it has distinctive italic version that looks great with syntax highlighting. Check it out!
YHBT :)
Opened it, stuck it into Eclipse's main C++ code font, size 10 (the size that Eclipse was using by default with the default font in Windows 7). Looked okay until I scrolled around a bit.
A hex string with E in it looked atrocious and the left-bar of the E was at least three times thicker than any other line anywhere and just drew your eyes to the E.
Not what you want when you need to transcribe some hexadecimal number correctly and have your eye drawn to the E all the time.
Other than that... well, it's just a font. It does the job if you want to avoid proprietary fonts. But the E thing made it look like every other "free/open" font used to 20 years ago.
If you have SAP installed, on Windows at least, it's worth giving "Arial Monospaced for SAP" a whirl - I found it simple and clean but more modern than Courier. I've switched to Consolas now I'm on Windows 7, but it was my monospaced font of choice for years on XP.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I'm so excited. I just can't wait until they release a type cylinder for this font for my ASR-33. the old font got really hard to read, especially when the ribbon was getting dry.
This new font aint too bad, but unfortunately it doesn't work well as terminal font as GNU Unifont does, also limited Unicode support is a problem. And * is totally wrong in this font, it should be 6 pointed and same size and location as +, like in Unifont: http://www.inside.org/~raynet/unifont.png
- Raynet --> .
Too big. Need to show how it renders in smaller sizes, as that's how it will be used for coding.
factor 966971: 966971
Still set my IDE editor font to FixedSys, still for me the best readable font for long coding sessions..