What (monospaced) fonts are people using in Scite?

[Chris Clark]

I'm using the virgin 1.77 Windows build from monospaced and
"everything is monospaced" by using the tip in:

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEFAQ.html#FixedWidth

For the default font (from global) Courier New this works great.
However, this font is not great at showing differences between the
following characters:

|1il oO0

So I've been playing with many different mono fonts. One gotcha with
monospaced fonts, Scite, and syntax highlighting is that _some_
highlighting in Scite is done via both colours/colors and bold. If you
use a font that does not have a bold version, Windows makes a bold
version up and gets the spacing incorrect. You can see this with, say
a Windows batch/cmd file with the following:

REM set MKSLOC=C:\PROGRA~1\MKSTOO~1
set MKSLOC=C:\PROGRA~1\MKSTOO~1


(or a shell script, C, python, etc with something similar). Everything
after the keyword "set" is off by a pixel (due to be being bold) if
you do not use a font that has bold available. Courier New does have a
bold version this will look fine, if you use say "Lucida Sans
Unicode", "Fixedsys", or "Lucida Console" you will see the problem.

I've tried a few fonts NOT shipped with Windows XP; like Monaco
http://www.webdevkungfu.com/textmate-envy-aka-monaco-font-for-windows/
but still no luck.

I have had some luck with Consolas which you can get from powerpoint
2007 viewer pack (I think it ships in Vista too) and the one I'm using
at the moment is http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Download
- this has bold versions so looks ok and has a zero with a marker in
it so you know it is not a letter "O".

Does anyone have any other fonts ideas to share?

Chris

[phayz]

On Feb 25, 12:19 pm, Chris Clark <Chris.Cl...@ingres.com> wrote:
> I'm using the virgin 1.77 Windows build from monospaced and
> "everything is monospaced" by using the tip in:
>
> http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEFAQ.html#FixedWidth
>

> Does anyone have any other fonts ideas to share?

It's odd that you should ask because I recently found a monospace font
which is freely available (free as in beer, but not free as in
freedom) after an exhaustive search. My prefered monospace font is
Envy Code R and can be found here -

http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released

Don't be put off the the "preview" part of the name. There may be
more work to be done by its author/designer but I can't see any
problems with it.


Regards,

Russell Dickenson

[John Yeung]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Chris Clark <Chris...@ingres.com> wrote:

> So I've been playing with many different mono fonts. One gotcha with
> monospaced fonts, Scite, and syntax highlighting is that _some_
> highlighting in Scite is done via both colours/colors and bold. If you
> use a font that does not have a bold version, Windows makes a bold
> version up and gets the spacing incorrect.

One option is to not use bold highlighting. I've turned it off for
any language I use regularly, because I find the bold too visually
jarring. Same goes for too many colors.

And while I am a little surprised and dismayed by how few fonts are
designed to differentiate those problem characters you identified, I
find that this is not as big a deal in a highlighting editor which
allows you to choose a different style for numbers.

If you are still hunting for other monospaced fonts to try, I would
suggest taking a look at Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, another reasonably
good free font.

John

[Philippe Lhoste]

On 25/02/2009 03:19, Chris Clark wrote:
> Does anyone have any other fonts ideas to share?

It is a very common and popular question in the programming world.
See, for example, the Programming Fonts
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/485174/programming-fonts> thread (which points to
another thread, etc.).
Personally, I have settled for Andale Mono a long time ago. It was available for free on
Microsoft site some years ago, it is still distributed in a SourceForge project (corefonts).
I have tried many fixed width fonts (Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Inconsolata, Lucida Sans
Typewriter, etc.) and still look around. Personally, I don't like the blurry look of
ClearType fonts at small sizes, so Consolas is out.

Note that Andale Mono has no bold variant, so I fear I don't address your specific
question. But I avoid, in general, using bold and italic in my styles.

--
Philippe Lhoste
-- (near) Paris -- France
-- http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

[KHMan]

Philippe Lhoste wrote:
> On 25/02/2009 03:19, Chris Clark wrote:
>> Does anyone have any other fonts ideas to share?
>
> It is a very common and popular question in the programming world.
> See, for example, the Programming Fonts
> <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/485174/programming-fonts> thread (which points to
> another thread, etc.).
> Personally, I have settled for Andale Mono a long time ago. It was available for free on
> Microsoft site some years ago, it is still distributed in a SourceForge project (corefonts).
> I have tried many fixed width fonts (Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Inconsolata, Lucida Sans
> Typewriter, etc.) and still look around. Personally, I don't like the blurry look of
> ClearType fonts at small sizes, so Consolas is out.
>
> Note that Andale Mono has no bold variant, so I fear I don't address your specific
> question. But I avoid, in general, using bold and italic in my styles.

I'm still sticking to Courier New on Win32 SciTE... but on Win32
terminal windows, I've switched to Liberation Mono. Since Red
Hat's first release, it's now quite well hinted at small point
sizes, good for platforms like Windows XP, which I think can
render TTF only with a limited number of grayscales. Bold's not
quite perfect on rvxt, but does look much better on WinXP/SciTE.

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

[bogdan...@gmail.com]

I'm using Courier New Bold, size 11 since i have a 22 lcd and i'm
staying far from the monitor.
I use courier since i need utf-8 chars (romanian ţ ă â î ) and i was
unable to find them in other fonts.

[Chris Clark]

I tried all suggestions out and Unicode support was one of the big
issues. Some of the fonts that I did like had poor or really poor
Unicode support. Where really poor means a blank space was used for
missing glyphs, and poor means some kind of box was used to make clear
that the glyph was missing.

I'm probably going to stick with DejaVu Sans Mono (which is based on
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, DejaVu has better Unicode support) - this
has better Unicode support than Courier New (under Windows). I may
switch between one of the fonts I liked with poor Unicode support
though as I don't need non-ASCII that often. Based on the "don't use
bold styles" idea, I might look at writing a Lua script to strip all
the bold flags from styles on the fly (so I can use the default
property files unmodified).

Chris

[LM]

I usually use courier new or courier, but I'd dug up a list of
monospaced font alternatives at one time.
Here are some of the links I still have from last time I was looking
into this:
http://keithdevens.com/wiki/ProgrammerFonts
http://www.lowing.org/fonts/
http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

Am sure there are more out there.

Best wishes.
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/cpp/scitetip.htm