Author Topic: 18 Monospace fonts comparison screenshot (Read 192,131 times)

jroad · « **on:** February 18, 2006, 11:50 PM »

Hi all,

After further research on monospace fonts after the Dina thread: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=2397.0 I gathered up many fonts from:
http://www.lowing.org/fonts/ and http://typographi.com/000744.php

I decided to compile several of them together in one pic to offer a quick way to compare them. Attached is the ClearType off version captured with Mouser's Screenshot Captor.

Enjoy!

[Edit: Added the ClearType version. In making the screenshot, the truetype version of each font was used if available. Please note that there can be a significant visual difference between the bitmap and the truetype version.]

mouser · « **Reply #1 on:** February 19, 2006, 12:00 AM »

absolutely brilliant!!!

programmers should pay special attention to that last row.

mouser · « **Reply #2 on:** February 19, 2006, 12:02 AM »

my vote still goes for Dina as the cripest and clearest font for its size.

allen · « **Reply #3 on:** February 19, 2006, 04:32 AM »

Dina is great, my only gripe with it is how unelegantly it sizes up -- which makes no difference unless you try to use it as default in your browser and it's in a header.

ProFontWindows and Sheldon don't look half bad, either.

mouser · « **Reply #4 on:** February 19, 2006, 05:18 AM »

profotnt windows does look really excellent for its size. it's a bit small for me but otherwise really good.

Jibz · « **Reply #5 on:** February 19, 2006, 08:56 AM »

Very nice comparison -- nothing beats viewing them side by side like that

.

I think there might be a problem with fixedsys and the Proggy fonts though. It looks like they have been scaled on the screenshot?

jgpaiva · « **Reply #6 on:** February 19, 2006, 09:27 AM »

Thanks for the comparison, jroad.
That's a very good compilation of several fonts, thanks for having the hard word doing the screenshot for helping everyone

My favourite is Andale Mono, as it's perfectlly balanced (dina just seems too vertically streched), the letters are almost round, very easy to distinguish between characters and words, and no problem with similar characters.

housetier · « **Reply #7 on:** February 19, 2006, 10:06 AM »

I have been using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono for a long time now. Bitstream Vera fonts are truetype fonts. The monospaced variant is good for programming because you easily tell "one" from "ell" from "eye" from "big eye"; the zero also looks significantly different from "oh".

Dina has this too, but it does not seem to be a truetype font and therefor is not available for me. My recommendation for all Linux-users is to give Bitstream Vera Sans Mono a shot. On most systems its also known as simply "Monospace".

I know there are bitmap fonts available for linux, but, frankly, they look ugly. Anyway, this is my two cents from the linux front.

OGroeger · « **Reply #8 on:** February 19, 2006, 10:12 AM »

Nice work, jroad. But i agree with Jibz, that something must have gone wrong. Some of the fonts looking so bad as to be unusable. Fixedsys for instance. Or Bitstream vera sans mono. I know this font and i never saw the numbers this crumpy. It is true, that the dot in the "0" is looking sometimes off-center, but the "0" is at least round.

Jibz · « **Reply #9 on:** February 19, 2006, 12:54 PM »

Quote from: "jgpaiva"

dina just seems too vertically streched

Just wanted to note that the version in the original screenshot is dina 9pt, which is 1 pixel higher than the original 8pt version from my screenshot. I prefer the slightly lower 8pt version, but I added the 9pt and 10pt versions for people with high resolutions where the 8pt version became too cramped

.

jroad · « **Reply #10 on:** February 19, 2006, 07:20 PM »

Hi all,

Thanks for the feedback. Let me try and clear up some of the questions.

Quote

I think there might be a problem with fixedsys and the Proggy fonts though. It looks like they have been scaled on the screenshot?

The fixedsys I used is the redesigned FixedSys500c TTF version (#17 on lowing.org). I believe the one in your screenshot is the default bitmap version.
The Proggyfonts (www.proggyfonts.com) are pretty slick in that each one comes available in a bitmap, truetype, and X windows format. The ones I used here are also the truetype version. I downloaded the bitmap version of Clean and it does seem to correspond to the one in your screenshot as well. In general, for my comparison, I used the truetype version if available, something I should have mentioned that before.

Quote

Nice work, jroad. But i agree with Jibz, that something must have gone wrong. Some of the fonts looking so bad as to be unusable. Fixedsys for instance. Or Bitstream vera sans mono. I know this font and i never saw the numbers this crumpy. It is true, that the dot in the "0" is looking sometimes off-center, but the "0" is at least round.

My guess here is that you use ClearType? It certainly smooths things out and makes some fonts bolder. I will go ahead and upload the ClearType version. The screenshot size is identical, so if you have an appropriate image viewer (I still use ACDSEE 5) you can quickly see how Cleartype affects the truetype fonts.

OGroeger · « **Reply #11 on:** February 19, 2006, 08:16 PM »

Quote

My guess here is that you use ClearType? It certainly smooths things out and makes some fonts bolder. I will go ahead and upload the ClearType version. The screenshot size is identical, so if you have an appropriate image viewer (I still use ACDSEE 5) you can quickly see how Cleartype affects the truetype fonts.

I'm afraid not. This is how it is on my systems:

This is Windows without Clearcase:

This is Windows with Clearcase:

And this is on my laptop with KDE and XServer 6.7

Maybe there are other factors that influence the look?

jroad · « **Reply #12 on:** February 19, 2006, 09:03 PM »

Quote

Maybe there are other factors that influence the look?

Interesting. Our ClearType samples look the same , but not the standard samples. I would much prefer my font to look like yours! Let's see if we can eliminate somei possibilities. I got my Bitstream Vera Sans Mono from: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/

The file is named VeraMono.tff, is 49K, and dated 4/16/2003. I used the .zip package (hopefully that shouldn't matter). Is this what you are using?

OGroeger · « **Reply #13 on:** February 20, 2006, 07:27 AM »

I guess i know what the difference is: My stupidity.

When i said "not clearcase" i put the aliasing setting from "Clearcase" to "Standard". But you meant "not aliasing", right? So you disabled the whole thing using the checkbox?

jroad · « **Reply #14 on:** February 20, 2006, 08:01 AM »

Quote

But you meant "not aliasing", right? So you disabled the whole thing using the checkbox?

I think you figured out the difference! I had that checkbox disabled and not set to standard. Good job figuring that out. For some reason, I thought it was either ClearType or Nothing (=Standard).

mouser · « **Reply #15 on:** February 21, 2006, 09:23 PM »

link to jibz's Dina font page for those that don't remember: http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/index.html

koreth · « **Reply #16 on:** February 22, 2006, 12:04 AM »

Nice font comparison! But it doesn't include my two favorite programming fonts: Sheldon Narrow and Consolas. Sheldon Narrow is from the same place as the Sheldon font you included in your roundup, but I find the narrow version easier to read -- and it's smaller too! Consolas is from Windows Vista but is easy to find using Google. I think Consolas looks absolutely amazing on my LCD with ClearType. (But it really needs ClearType; it doesn't look as good as Sheldon Narrow on my CRT.)

mouser · « **Reply #17 on:** February 22, 2006, 12:28 AM »

consolas sounds nice - love to see a screenshot of it with full text above in same format as the others.. jroad?

ramaboule · « **Reply #18 on:** February 22, 2006, 01:21 AM »

My favorite programming font is the MonteCarlo font. It has bold and is in .fon (windows) and .pcf (X-window/linux) format:
http://www.bok.net/MonteCarlo/

mouser · « **Reply #19 on:** February 22, 2006, 01:55 AM »

montecarlo looks quite nice for its size, actually one of the best for it's size.. but its a bit small - does it scall up well?

jroad · « **Reply #20 on:** February 22, 2006, 09:32 AM »

Quote

consolas sounds nice - love to see a screenshot of it with full text above in same format as the others.. jroad?

Sure. When I get the time, I'll round up the fonts mentioned here as well as those mentioned in the digg.com comments posted at http://digg.com/programming/Visual_Comparison_of_18_Monospaced_Fonts and work on a new version unless someone beats me to it. Some fonts may or may not support the 9 size standard used. Also, I should probably point out things like which fonts are ttf and bitmapped. Also, a version with Windows XP standard smoothing should be done.

Thanks everybody for the comments.

jgpaiva · « **Reply #21 on:** February 22, 2006, 10:11 AM »

I couldn't find Consolas online, it seems like it's not available for distribution.
But I did find one screenshot. Looks good:

mentor · « **Reply #22 on:** February 22, 2006, 02:18 PM »

Hmmm, could you post some 'standard' screenshots, as ClearType is dependent on LCD technology, and moreover, the particular type of LCD in use. Displaying it on CRT won't look good, and displaying it on the wrong type of LCD will look wrong. More info: http://www.grc.com/ct/ctwhat.htm

koreth · « **Reply #23 on:** February 22, 2006, 02:48 PM »

Here is a screenshot of Consolas at a few different point sizes. This is on an HP Pavilion laptop, so if you're looking at this on a CRT or your LCD is BGR instead of RGB this will look lousy to you. As I said above, it is not a good font for non-ClearType displays. If you're on a CRT don't even bother with it; just about any of the others in this comparison will look better.

damieng · « **Reply #24 on:** February 22, 2006, 02:57 PM »

There seems to be a bit of confusion here.

Some of these fonts are bitmapped "pixel" fonts, plotted point by point. They are normally in Windows .fon format and won't scale as such. If it appears to scale it is simply because there are multiple drawn versions in the file but should look identical on Mac/Linux systems if the font files are converted properly.

The more professional fonts are in TrueType/OpenType format which is scalable vector operations. These fonts will look different depending on whether you have smoothing off, on or ClearType and will look different again on Mac OS X and Linux systems because of differences in the font rendering engines.

Some TrueType/OpenType fonts will appear not smoothed when smoothing is on if;

1. The font information contains specific information that it shouldn't be smoothed at certain sizes (GASP records)
2. It contains hand-tuned bitmap representations of the font or advanced hinting information on where to put the pixels at low sizes
3. The font is in fact individual squares to represent pixels, converted from a bitmap font

The third option is why some TrueType fonts only work at a specific size. This was mainly done because some Windows apps notably Macromedia Flash only work with TrueType fonts. These fonts will also look pixelated when printed.

Anyway, to add an extra font or two to the list one of my favourite proper TrueType ones is Anonymous from http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html

For bitmapped font I use my own Envy Code B from http://www.damieng.com/damieng/typography/Original/EnvyCodeB.aspx

[)amien