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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?
... 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
We've already got plenty of good fonts for programming, and this doesn't actually look that good.
Fonts are a huge issue because we need them to, you know, communicate. The license you are looking for is "completely free to use and modify". That way you know that not only are you able to use it, but the font is going to be maintained and stick around, making life easier for everybody.
The typography landscape is littered with quality fonts that nobody uses because they are not free to maintain.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Well, the standard is pretty much the Microsoft-Apple TrueType (designed as a competing standard to Adobe PostScript fonts). (Yes, Microsoft and Apple worked on TrueType together, during the 90s when they were fierce enemies). Even then it's not a simple spec because it's actually quite difficult to lay out text nicely.
One of the jobs of a typesetter is to actually arrange the page so the text flows properly, and it's more of an art than a science. It's why TrueType implements a virtual machine to help with the automatic arrangement of characters.
It's also why designing a font is damn hard - creating the character shapes is the easiest part, but doing the necessary back end work to ensure it looks pleasant to the eye no matter the word/letter combinations is difficult (hence the virtual machine). And then there's Unicode, so you have to way more shapes to contend with (luckily a lot of them get by with monospace).
Finally, the licenses reflect the fact that fonts are a tool - so there's a lot of complexity in them. First, printing them out means having to send the font over at times (if it's not rasterized locally), so you need to enable translation of the font to the printer's natively language. Then you need to consider that electronic documents may need to embed fonts in them to look the same on every computer, even the ones without the font, but that embedding is now distribution of the font.
The license is complex purely because copyright law doesn't cover it terribly well. Embedding is a form of distribution and derivative work. Printing can mean creating a derivative work so the printer can rasterize it. Then there may be distribution if you want to send it to a printing press so they need the font as well...
As for raster fonts - they're great, but when you're dealing with high res screens, they start to show their chunkiness. I just wish some of the nice raster fonts were availble as TrueType so they can scale up nicely and be razor sharp on high res "retina" screens.
Probably. If you did much coding where you aligned things horizontally, like with a list of #define's in C, you'd probably rethink your assertion.
sig: sauer
Am I the only person who thinks code looks better and is more readable with proportional font spacing?
You're the only one who thinks it's ok if tables don't line up and ascii art falls apart.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Now if only we could put the command prompt fullscreen again!
I haven't used ASCII art since I started coding on Windows about 20 years ago. I code in Verdana. All the other programmers tell me I'm wrong but they can't tell me why. Some of them switch and never go back.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
One of the jobs of a typesetter is to actually arrange the page so the text flows properly, and it's more of an art than a science. It's why TrueType implements a virtual machine to help with the automatic arrangement of characters.
That's kerning. TrueType solves this problem with a static kerning table.
The virtual machine is for hinting - adjusting the outlines so that they still produce reasonable bitmaps at small point sizes. It has nothing to do with the flow of text.
This is my coding font: screenshot It's a 4pt display of TFA's font, which almost the same but slightly clearer at that size than Liberation Mono, which I was using before.
It sometimes involves a bit of pixel hunting with digits before you get used to it, but I now use it for my standard daily coding environment. I like fitting EVERYTHING onscreen at once.
The 90's called, and they want their vector font formats back. The modern standard is OpenType, which is a merger of Truetype and Adobe's Postscript formats with additional standardized features to handle complex layout as found in the Sanskrit derived scripts of South and South East Asia.