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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?
8ut there are lots of reasons to switch away from Courier. 0ne obvious reason is that l made four easy-to-over1ook typos in this post alone.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
There's only three typos in your post and believe me they're very easy to see on a system where fonts are displayed properly instead of being hammered into sub-pixels.
Nope, four:
8ut - 8 not B
0ne - 0 not O
that l made - lower case L not I
easy-to-over1ook - 1 not l
not so easy to see I guess.
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.
Let me be more specific. Think about a lower case m. We want each of the three vertical strokes to look exactly the same, even if antialiased. Your eye will really complain if this isn't the case, even on a high resolution display. (If not then don't worry about it, quality anything is not for you. You can save a lot of money on stereo equipement.) Hinting will adjust those three strokes to be equally separated in terms of pixel units, even if exact alignment to pixel boundaries is not possible. Then if you display the same font much larger, the strokes will be allowed to move to the exact positions defined by the artist. Hopefully, showing good taste. That's just the beginning of it, hinting a huge and subtle topic. Trying to pretend it doesn't matter, or actually lowers quality, does nothing but demonstrate ignorance.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.