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Comment by bluekeybox | Hacker News Reader

Just tried in my editor. At a size small enough to fit as many lines of text on screen as I can with Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, PTMono letters look like barely legible squiggles.

Still yet to find a font that competes with Menlo/Vera Sans Mono for coding on a 900px-tall laptop screen. If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me know.

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I really like Anonymous Pro, 11pt font, 0.9 linespacing on my 1440x900 mac. Looks good with light AA

http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html

edit: it sort of has serifs. kind of. well more than most sans fonts

I like this one, thanks. It appears to be a lighter-looking (at least with my font smoothing settings) version of Courier (which is good because regular Courier is legible but quite heavy at small sizes). The "serifs" are actually slabs, just like in Courier.

That's what they're called!

Yeah, Courier is way too thick for my tastes.

My favorite is the Envy Code R: http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...

I'm using it with full hinting enabled on Ubuntu/Xubuntu and it looks just as nice as the Windows screenshots on the homepage.

Thanks. I tried it out, and here's the thing about Envy: it's a horizontally condensed typeface, which is good if your lines of code are very long (great if you're a Java programmer and have to deal with names like myAbstractFactoryClassMethodVerisonFive), but rather terrible if you're someone like me who keeps his lines no longer than 80 characters and has a habit of splitting his code windows into two or three vertical panels.

The idea is to fit as many lines of text vertically, not to condense long lines horizontally. Human vision has some sort of legibility tradeoff where you can have letters that are either horizontally condensed but tall or vertically condensed but short. I am looking for something of the second kind for my main coding font.

Try dotsies: http://dotsies.org/

Lol.

Do you know whether the author plans to release it under an open license? A few years ago he promised to do that after the 1.0 release, but it seems unlikely at this point.

I'm a fan of Monte Carlo (http://www.bok.net/MonteCarlo/). ProFont is also really nice, but doesn't have a proper bold version.

Try Proggy Tiny (Slashed Zero): http://www.proggyfonts.com/index.php?menu=download

ProFont works well for me. http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/

Have a gander at Terminus 9pt. It's the one pixel font I can actually bear to look at.

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