I’ve just purchased a 20" 1600x1280 TFT display. On my old CRT I used Andale Mono at 9pt for years and was very happy, however I’ve probably wasted more than 4 hours trying to find a font that will work with this new screen!
Ideally I would like a font that:
Looks good at sizes 10pt - 12pt, anything else makes very small text at this DPI.
Has a stroke width of more than 1 pixel at the 10-12pt size. The higher resolution of this screen makes single-pixel-width-strokes look very thin and spidery, especially against a white background.
Looks good without Clear Type or Antialiasing enabled. I don’t mind seeing pixels (they are so tiny now anyway!) because my eyes become fatigued less quickly when the characters are sharp.
I hope someone has a suggestion or two for high-res fonts, but if anyone else is in the same boat, the best thing I’ve found so far is probably Triskweline 10pt. It still has a 1-pixel strole width, so it’s not perfect, but it is quite good.
I’ve now had a few weeks to get used to this 1600x1200 resolution. Fonts that render to an adequate height (10 or 11pt) with 1-pixel width strokes still look a bit spidery to my taste, but 2-pixel-width strokes look far too fat and heavy so I’ve eventually settled on thinner fonts.
Triskweline 10pt is still good but I’ve found some others I prefer.
Bitmapped: Dina, Ti92Plus, PixelCarnage (a wee bit too much whitespace in this one though).
I’d love to see how Pragmata looks without antialiasing but there’s no way I’m paying that much to try it out!
Another vote for Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Awesome font with Cleartype enabled, not so great without, but i work with cleartype all the time now. Consolas is number 2 in my books.
Hmm - Aaron, to be honest I am not that keen on Pragmata, from the demo page. Yes, the high x-height probably makes it more legible in smaller sizes, but it also means it has to have something of the appearance of a compressed font. Look at the lowercase “g” for example - not very pretty. But each to his own!
Although the conventional wisdom is that screen reading is the reverse of paper reading - making sans fonts better for body copy and serifs for headings - I am not so sure. Ol’ Courier New may be boring but for me it works…!
I just use Emacs (and xterm, and Firefox) with a default black on white. My colleagues think I’m crazy for using the tiniest fonts I can get out of my X server on a dual 1920x1600 or some such. That’s usually Courier inside Emacs (because it has a tolerable bold) and the very basic 5x9 or 6x10 in the xterms.
I’m kind of divided regarding serifs or not. The serifs in Courier tend to make the text look cluttered (maybe I should artificially add some more space between lines somehow?) but I also do email and documentation in Emacs, and there I vastly prefer legible word gestalts over those skimpy and but crisp individual letter renderings you get with a good sans-serif font.
Thanks for the tip to tweak down the white background to off-white; I did that once upon a time but I’ve been too lazy to do it across server upgrades etc. Actually in the xterms I start them up with a script which selects a light pastel background color which identifies which server it’s running on. … Time passes … For Emacs I found (set-face-background 'default “seashell”), the greyish light colors are too close to the window decorations and the other lights are too strong for my taste, but this one is kind of nice.
Speaking of Emacs. Some of the syntax coloring packages I use want to use boldface for some things, so seeing font samples with a mixture of bold and plain would be nice. (Italics / oblique, too, I guess, although I’ve zapped those oblique styles where I have come across them, notwithstanding that I had basically decided to stop tweaking my settings.)
i switched my environment (gray-on-black, mild syntax highlighting, vim) to it and never looked back.
it’s a bit larger than the usual suspects which makes just right it for my 1920x1200 dell. might be too small for larger resolution but there’s still the ttf version…
It’s funny, my first programming course’s instructor favored Comic Sans - gawd was it awful.
I just wanted to add that I found it ironic that another programmer liked Courier New. I came across it when I first learned to program as an alternative to the ghastly Comic Sans my instructor was teaching with. I should be clear, he wrote in English prose with Comic Sans, but for his programming examples, they were wide ranging from Times New Roman to Monospaced… any day they could be a different font. I don’t think he really knew his way around word processors… it was either that or he didn’t have time for solid preparation. Anyways, while learning to program in Emacs I found Courier New to just fit what code should look like. After some searching around, I find that we’re not the only programmers to like this font.
With time comes change and I’m looking for a pleasant and easy on the eyes style. I think it’s time for a change when I find myself staring at code and getting lost in its appearance rather than its true meaning. 1’s being mistaken for l’s and I’ve found that I want strikethrough’s of some sort for my 0’s. Thanks for the pointers… I’m going to be giving these a try. Specifically, I’m liking Vera Sans and Bitstream Vera Sans.
