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Adobe Releases New Openly Licensed Coding Font

Posted by Unknown on from the since-when-was-adobe-this-cool dept.

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?

3 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Call me a dinosaur... by Dwedit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Good ol' Courier" is that font where the 1 and lowercase L look almost the same. At least the uppercase i looks distinct in that font.
    I use Consolas now.

  2. Re:Call me a dinosaur... by nahdude812 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But then, no sane coder uses a light background for coding, right?

    Actually a light background is (somewhat counter-intuitively) easier on the eyes, especially in dim lighting scenarios. The reason comes down to the optical properties of your eyes, which we can talk about in camera terms. A narrow aperture creates a broad depth of field, while a narrow aperture creates a very shallow depth of field. Bright scenery requires a narrow aperture and a broad depth of field, while dark scenery (is certainly moodier) requires a wide open aperture and a very shallow depth of field.

    That means that the brighter things are, the smaller your iris is, the more movement you can have in your head without your screen really going out of focus. Very dark setups with dark code (the stereotypical coding setup, it certainly looks cool) actually lead to more eye strain than a bright working environment and white background on your code. Eye strain is caused by constantly shifting focus, and that is alleviated by bright environs and bright code. Dark setups can require only a few millimeters of movement before your eyes are having to refocus. Bright setups can give you several centimeters of movement.

    --
    Slay a dragon... over lunch!
  3. Re:Why? by mister_playboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Your post reminded me of this: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html

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    Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will