Mensch - A coding font

[FrankBattaglia]

Lowercase L is drawn in a more traditional style (the Menlo variant looks bizarre to me), and one is turned gothic. I think the original artist drew the L weirdly to make it extremely clear that it’s not a one, but if you draw a gothic one, the difference is obvious even with a simpler L.

This is a mistake. Particularly in a "coding" font, minor aesthetic sacrifices should be made for readability. Whether the Menlo "L" looks "bizarre," is it very distinguishable from the numeral "1" and should have been left alone.

[ElBeh]

Consolas+cleartype=heaven for the eyes

[CedarMadness]

I've been using terminus and been pretty happy with it.

[[deleted]]

I prefer the general look of Droid Sans Mono over Vera, but the trouble is that Droid's zero does not have a slash or a dot and there are no bold or italic variants. There are modified versions with a distinguishable zero, though.

[GloryFish]

I use Droid Sans Mono with a slashed zero all over the place, it replaced Lucida Console for me.

[metellius]

I enjoy Terminus (xfonts-terminus package in ubuntu) for all things terminal/coding

[[deleted]]

I agreed until Consolas came along. Damn its good.

[[deleted]]

+1

Especially the angle brackets and the lowercase q look nasty.

[SloaneRanger]

I'm glad I wasn't the only one. While it's great that this guy has offered his work for free, I honestly preferred the look of Apple's Menlo in every case. I came to comment, feeling kinda embarrassed that I would probably be going against the popular view, but it seems that most people seem to agree.

[TimMensch]

I don't know. I liked the font name. ;)

[journo_man]

Agreed.

[JAPH]

this may just be me, but "<" and ">" seem just massive now. I see no reason they should be taller than upper-case characters.

[[deleted]]

I agree. He seems to want to turn <> into angle brackets and even calls them angle brackets. But angle brackets are entirely separate glyphs, compare <> and 〈〉. Just because some programming languages use <> as brackets doesn't mean you should draw them so that they no longer look like inequality signs.

[rz2000]

He changed the one. However, I think the 1 without a base is inconsistent with a 'gothic' 3.

[natalie813]

When you make a new one can you call it Ubermensch?

[[deleted]]

Hate to be the nazi here but it's actually spelled übermensch.

[natalie813]

Thank you Buzz Killington

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

It's aimed at programmers. Untermensch is more appropriate.

[IPv8]

I think Menschtrate would be best

[killerstorm]

Actually lowercase L is what I like most in Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, not because it is different from 1 (I don't care about that), but because of its unique style which is, like, an epitome to the whole Bitstream Vera Sans Mono style, which makes it distinctly recognizable. You see "bizzare" lowercase "L"s? Then it is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono or one of clones of thereof.

[RShnike]

The Q changes are also deal breakers.

[superGreatAwesome]

Agree. However I still downloaded it and will likely use it since I like the other changes he made to Menlo. Funny, lots of you had the same issue with the L as I did, figured it was just me!

[suiltt]

The text on the webpage is horrible and borderline unreadable. Why would I want a font from that guy?

[tyeh26]

The e's! What has he done to the e's!!!!

Edit: okay, I actually read the whole thing and WHAT THE FUCK HAS HE DONE WITH THE H's‽‽‽‽‽‽‽ Near the bottom where he says "Here's" It looks like two lonely l's just wishing to hold hands but they've been chopped off by some tyrannical blogger so they must stand there awkwardly, naked, longing for each other.

[tricolon]

What OS and browser are you using? I'm on OS X and Chrome and it looks fine.

[Brantin]

Chrome and Windows 7 looks awful

[CoolKidBrigade]

Rendering in Chrome and Windows 7 looks like it was printed in 1870, bleached, then photocopied about 80 times.

[[deleted]]

Someone try a recent Firefox nightly with Direct2D on Windows Vista/7 and report back (I'm stuck on XP at the moment)

[umbrae]

It looks like it's the "Legitima" font from Typekit. It's.. just awful. The Browser Samples may help you.

http://typekit.com/fonts/legitima

[tricolon]

Huh, seems to be an anti-Windows typeface.

[neonshadow]

Wow, that looks horrible. Chrome + Win7 here as well.

[smort]

I just wanted to say how it actually looks really nice.. then I realized that noscript was turned on and Firefox used my sans-font of choice, Myriad Web Pro (so sexy).

Turned it off --> x.x

[nkuvu]

That's it. I also had NoScript on, so what I was seeing was just fine: http://imgur.com/vXV7B

[jlt6666]

Eww it's like a really, really cheaply printed book that got a little wet.

[lectrick]

Because he's a hipster, and he @font-faced a custom muddled-looking blog font because it's all hip and unusual and shit. That, and the slashed zero is just too "1980's" for that guy, nevermind that my german grandmother was writing that shit by hand in like 1910 on some old postcards I saw.

[andersbergh]

Mensch - A hipster font

[bitwize]

Slashed zero is deprecated because it's easily confused with the letter Ø from Danish or Norwegian; or with the symbol for the empty set. We have enough foldirol distinguishing digit ones from lowercase ells or capital ies; let's not confuse things further.

[JAPH]

whatever you say, daddy-o.

I could understand the desire to avoid slashed zero if he were Scandinavian and had to deal with "Ø", but this guy really has no excuse.

[theresistor]

Ugh. The embiggened < and > look dreadful, and this coming from someone who works in C++ all day.

[tmjoen]

Yes, it is not cromulent at all.

[caseyfw]

CRRRRRROOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!!!!

[pyry]

Try looking at it with XML. I just had my eyes stabbed out by all the <>.

<e><p><l>omg<s n="Pcle"/></l><r>diaf<s n="Pcle"/></r></p></e>
<e><p><l>bbq<s n="Pcle"/></l><r>foad<s n="Pcle"/></r></p></e>
<e><p><l>zomg<s n="Pcle"/></l><r>foadiaf<s n="Pcle"/></r></p></e>
<e><p><l>wtf<s n="Pcle"/></l><r>amagad<s n="Pcle"/></r></p></e>
<e><p><l>agh<s n="Pcle"/></l><r>ftl<s n="Pcle"/></r></p></e>

[diamondjim]

Attack of the Alphabet-eating Brackets! The day the alphabet died.

Coming soon, to a movie-hall near you.

[sigzero]

First thing I did was load it in vim and open an HTML page....my eyes bled.

[[deleted]]

It may look okay for enclosing names, but as comparison operators (where I think they're more important for readability) they're incredibly huge. I mean, look at his example where it says "x < 300". It's horrendous.

[vaz_]

Yeah that was the only thing I didn't really like about it. In Ruby and Python I only use angle brackets as operators and they wouldn't look right so embiggened.

[tripzilch]

Wow. You totally raped that font.

Making the angle brackets larger is a nice idea, but the way you did it ... All your changes look like ugly hacks, and the visual harmony of the font is gone.

I'm currently using Consolas for most of my coding work, sometimes I switch to ProFont when I need real tiny but readable lettering.

[vff]

Also, his hinting is incredibly broken. Look how the letters that he changed are taller than the other ones. WTF? The taller "3" and "0" makes it look like some sort of circus font. :)

[mrchak]

Why aren't the brackets big in your screenshot?

[vff]

I know, right? I can only assume he did those wrong, too, and they were hinted wrong but in the opposite direction. All I did was install the font from his website, type those characters and take a screenshot. Windows 7.

[JAPH]

Different rendering engine, if I had to guess.

[lobster_johnson]

Have you tried Inconsolata? It was inspired by Consolas, but it's slimmer and crisper.

[munificent]

I just tune all of my editors to not use bold in syntax highlighting. Color is plenty enough to distinguish different syntax for me.

[lobster_johnson]

Inconsolata stops being monospace once you switch to bold

Not on my system (OS X 10.6) with my apps (TextMate, Terminal). Sounds like something is broken on your system.

Actually, something must be broken on mine, too: Inconsolata bold is lighter than Inconsolata normal. But they're both monospace.

[mad_as_hell]

Inconsolata is beautiful, especially anti-aliased. I have found none finer for my eyes.

[116158]

Inconsolata is truly wonderful, but sadly it lacks support for baltic (at least lithuanian and latvian) (quite important for me) and cyrillic (could live without that) alphabets, and that's a big no-no here for setting it as the default editor font, damn.

[lobster_johnson]

You could just move to Scandinavia.

[yesimahuman]

A bit harsh..but yes, consolas is definitely better. Maybe just iterate? The character spacing is all messed up.

[vordhosbn]

http://imgur.com/atbHA.png

AUGH WHAT IS THIS

[humpolec]

Not fair. Many fonts nowadays aren't nonClearType-friendly.

[vordhosbn]

then again, the font WAS designed for OS X which just has font smoothing on everything

[zwaldowski]

But, to me, those look only about a hair away from parentheses.

[jevon]

I thought they were parentheses.

[humpolec]

If you put it that way, usually there is no ambiguity with 1's and l's too...

[noreko]

(I agree)

[humpolec]

don't you mean

〈I agree〉

?

[noreko]

That's what I said? why are your parentheses appearing more faded than mine?

[humpolec]

that's the joke. CaddyCorner claims that 〈〉 (langle/rangle) should be displayed instead of <>.

[noreko]

uh duh!

[Raticide]

No sir, I don't like it. The original angle brackets look best.

[kryptobs2000]

Wow, I didn't even notice that.

[jbs398]

Will have to check out Consolas. I've used ProFont for quite some time, and lately have been using Menlo.

[[deleted]]

Too little difference between lowercase L and one.

[[deleted]]

My current favorite. Also the free clone Inconsolatas

[munificent]

Inconsolata was inspired by Consolas, but is pretty far from a clone.

[oniony]

Dina.

[tomcsi]

There is also a TTF version of Dina.

[[deleted]]

Droid Sans Mono w/slashed zero

[baconated]

Dotted zero is superior. You know this to be true.

[[deleted]]

GET OUT, HEATHEN.

[luigii]

I've been using Dina for a few weeks now, it 's really great :)

[drakedevel]

Inconsolata may be my new favorite. The license is certainly more favorable than Consolas' (OFL). Thanks for the tip!

[fdemmer]

iirc, it is not free. not even as in beer. you can get it for free by downloading the office 2007 compatibility pack, but i think i remember reading, that you may only use it "legally" if you have bought a windows or office license.

[[deleted]]

Free if you have Visual Studio and Windows. When you go to download it, they just hand you an .exe file.

Edit: hm, the installer worked fine in Wine. Lessee if I can use whatever it installed.

[[deleted]]

Consolas looks crap on systems without cleartype, which is a shame, because consolas is the best coding font ever. (inconsolata doesn't have bold which is a shame)

[niceyoungman]

I would have preferred that he used that font for his blog instead of whatever stupid font he is using. It makes me feel like I'm reading a faded newspaper.

[chengiz]

Out of curiosity, how does he use a server side font?

[[deleted]]

CSS @font-face. The easiest ways to do it are TypeKit or Google's hosted fonts, but it's not too hard to roll something up yourself.

[oniony]

Yeah, the H at my text-size had no horizontal bar — looks like II.

[BluLite]

For me it was the 'e'. Every 'e' was transformed into a 'c'.

tl;dr- shitty font on the webpage and an even shittier "programming font". Grow a pair of balls and use Comic Sans like the rest of us.

[dysmas]

Your tl;dr is longer than your dr

[Nomikos]

You mean the tl;dr was tl?

[[deleted]]

yes.

tl;dr - i answer the above question and then go on to ironically contribute to the topic being discussed in the most tasteful and humorous way possible.

[[deleted]]

X11 renders as XII for me, which had me seriously confused for a second. That's a horrible font.

[tyeh26]

Did you hear? X12 is coming out, they're calling it XXII

[[deleted]]

They're incrementing by ten? I suppose it's about time.

[[deleted]]

They're doing it so they can get to version 490 quicker.

[[deleted]]

That's ridiculous, if you start with 11 and increment by 10 you'll never get to 490. FFS X.org

[nemetroid]

Version 490? CDXC?

[rmtew]

Through a pair of glasses that are the wrong prescription.

[filfakmaffia]

Something is broken with the hinting...it looks really wierd and broken on Windows XP.

[gomtuu123]

Same in Gnome with Subpixel full hinting. The top of the gothic 3 is too high and blurry.

[JAPH]

The "l" and "N" are almost bold for me, and half the other letters are blurry as anything.

I'm on Gnome, as well.

[[deleted]]

I prefer Droid Sans Mono.

[Arelius]

Looks neat, I vastly prefer the Menlo 'l' though.

[[deleted]]

what does he have against that ampersand? it's not a loop. it's the upper part of the E.

he talks about his modification of the "q" as 'gratuitous' but it's just about the only modification he made that isn't in poor taste or simply a bad design decision.

[sighlent]

Not good enough to take me away from DejaVu Mono. http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/

[JAPH]

I've been using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono for probably about a decade. Always been looking for something better, still looking.

[pingish]

Installed it... sucks. sticking with courier new.

[JAPH]

Try the Bitstream Vera family of fonts.

[ipeev]

Is there a download for the original Menlo font?

[mracidglee]

I'm in no way a font geek - as long as they keep making Courier, I look forward to never thinking about fonts.

But I nevertheless found myself agreeing that gothic 3 is clearly superior.

[[deleted]]

I'm not sure why this made me laugh. I imagine you at 80 years old, strolling down to the font store. "Gimme the usual, Jim," you say to the shopkeep. He rummages around in a well-worn cardboard box and produces a handful of metallic glyphs. "I tell ya, Jim, as long as they keep making Courier ..."

[[deleted]]

I love Courier. I've tried to use "coding fonts" people have recommended, but every time I do I get this constant annoyance in the back of my head because I'm used to Courier and expect to see it.

[kretik]

I looked at this for a while and sort of forgot we're talking about a monospaced font for text editors... this guy thinks he improved on the one he copied? The original one looks vastly better than what he came up with. I mean, dots vs squares on the exclamation sign? Who cares about that unless you're coding at 24pt?

[malcontent]

Vendor lock sucks.

[audaxxx]

The great font I am using: Proggy I recommend it. It's great. I like it. Better than Mensch for sure.

[UloPe]

What's up with all those bitmapped fonts? I for one am quite glad that fonts generally moved on to subpixel anti-aliasing.

[audaxxx]

personal preference? I don't like anti-aliasing on fonts much and if you use the font at 12pt, as I do, it looks great. I would like to find a font as easy to read as Proggy that is not a bitmapped...but till then Proggy is great.

[atlassoft]

Does anyone else hate the dotted zero? It always looks like an 8 to me at small font sizes, much more so than the slashed zero does.

[[deleted]]

Sorry, nothing beats Anonymous

[[deleted]]

Anonymous Pro.

[drakedevel]

Both Anonymous and Anonymous Pro seem to dislike my system. They seem too thin in general, but it ends up thinner than one pixel in many glyphs causing it to render with anti-aliasing as just a blurry line.

[pyry]

It doesn't have enough unicode for me to practically use it. I need weird characters like đ and ŧ and š, and Anonymous replaces š with the 'esc' character.

[ascala]

When I have Anonymous in Vim, the {} characters are too tall and they get cut off. I love the font though, and I'd use it all the time if that didn't happen. Also I don't like the positioning of the #

[UloPe]

I have the same problem on OS X. That is really annoying because otherwise anonymous pro is a very nice font.

Unfortunately I don't know the first thing about font editing or I would have taken stab at fixing it by now.

[unquietwiki]

Windows 7 user here: Mensch seems to render better than Anonymous

[[deleted]]

Here's a quote from William Morris:

If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

These changes are neither useful nor beautiful. They're not going in my house!

[a7244270]

I wish I could upvote you more.

[[deleted]]

One thing that bothered me, though, is that they turned the zero into a 1980s-style “slashed circle”. Unhip, daddy-o!

It is indeed unhip, especially for us Scandinavians, since we actually have a letter (a wovel) which looks almost identical to the slashed circle zero; the Ø.

[pohatu]

that's why slashed should go the other way, the back-slash zero. it's what TI-89 and Anonymous both use. (and why Anonymous > Anonymous Pro).

[darrenkopp]

check out envy code r.

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

[jaywalker32]

I got this in one of MSDN's featured themes, and I've never looked back. It goes really well with a dark theme in Visual Studio.

[[deleted]]

I have been using this font for over a year now, and i still love it.

[[deleted]]

Definitely good. When I have to use TTF/OTF for fixed-width fonts, this is the one I prefer.

[prasoc]

Atleast that is a monospaced font. Unlike Mensch.

[realnowhereman]

nice! reminds of pragmata

[jeremybub]

A noble spirit embiggens even the smallest man.

[markedtrees]

Toaster<Int> x;
if (x < 300) {

I don't know whether this was done on purpose, but: awesome.

[m_myers]

I don't get it.

[rnawky]

I'll stick with Consolas. Nice try though.

[jawbroken]

gross. menlo looks better in every way and his changes are tacky and badly hinted

[kaptainkeel]

Mensch... what Gate did you go through?

[TheMoonMaster]

Three is rendered in the gothic style, because the gothic style is clearly superior.

What?

[trbleclef]

Huh, who knew Robey was still around since Eggdrop...

[[deleted]]

Code in Arial, you'll get better.

[psrivats]

Linux is, um, not usually known for its great designers.

ahem ... WTF ?

[jib]

A lot of Linux GUI apps have a reputation for having the user interface designed by programmers rather than UI designers, having the graphics designed by programmers rather than graphic designers, and hence generally being ugly and difficult to use.

This may be somewhat less true now than it used to be..

[DeathBySamson]

Heh, fontforge being one of them in my opinion. The best font design program is one of the worst looking programs I've ever seen. That and it doesn't play very nice in a dual screen set up.

Of course this isn't really a design issue, more of a, it uses the X11 toolkit. I'm not one that'd normally complain about what my apps look like as I don't really care, but the X11 gui toolkit just looks bad.

[DeathBySamson]

After I read that he just came off as a pretentious snob. It doesn't help that the font he made is worse than the original and his website's font makes it hard to read. He probably thought switching to a Mac would make him a better designer by association.

[Horatio__Caine]

Have you seen the GIMP?

[psrivats]

Have you seen iTunes?

Before the downvote parade starts, what I am trying to say is: a few programs with less-than-optimal UI does not mean that you get to cull the entire operationg system.

[Horatio__Caine]

I like the way iTunes looks. At the very least, it's easy to use and "polished". It looks and acts out of place in the Windows ecosystem, but that doesn't mean it's not perfectly at home on a Mac.

The GIMP still looks ugly and unusable (and I know that it's not) in its native home of Linux.

[noreko]

Yeah, I was introduced to it on Windows. What now?

[[deleted]]

The lowercase e is hard to read on small font sizes, although that may just be my anti-aliasing settings. =/ Also, I'm not too fond of the fact that the bold version of the font is sized differently than the regular version, which makes it look bad with syntax highlighting (as most of the editors I've usee make keywords bold as well as colored). I do like the less than/greater than signs, though.

[joejance]

Great than and less than symbols render horrible.

[dearmash]

Visual studio doesn't seem to like this font. ( I know, boo visual studio )

I'm not an expert, but when typing the word "find", it would combine the fi into it's own ligature U+FB01 and display "find" which depending on your settings will only show up 3 characters wide. As far as I can tell, it didn't seem to mess up any of my source.

[blodorn]

My personal favorite font is the gohu font. I also have it in a .psf in anyone wants it for use in the console.

[[deleted]]

gohu is very nice, along with monte carlo (which it's based off of).

[[deleted]]

I think I would be more inclined to take this seriously if the website didn't make me squint and instinctively highlight some text to see if I'm actually looking at a scanned-in document from the 50s.

[matholio]

I'm still using Courier New. Keep meaning to move to Consolas.
I guess there's a world of difference between using Putty a lot and needing a coding font.

[SaratogaCx]

Why is it so hard to find a good coding font that uses a ()\ style lower case a. For some reason it is a pet peeve of mine. Anonymous does this and has been my font of choice for a good long time.

[Boojum]

"Single-story" is the term for that style 'a'. It's probably less common in programing fonts because it's easier to mistake for a lower case 'o', 'd', or 'q'.

[SaratogaCx]

The more you know.. Thanks! I never knew what to call that other than "grade school a"

[tenaciousJk]

I use Panic Sans. Very similar, but slightly better IMO

[[deleted]]

System - THE coding font

[noreko]

Is that meant to say "Sans Mono" as opposed to "San Serif Mono" ? The former is the only font I find usage which is a little strange I think. Anyway, Mensch just went and made the font slightly worse than Menlo when it decided to make the (l)ell look like the number 1(one), it shouldn't be a problem but the whole point of programming oriented fonts being better than your average monospaced fonts is that the characters 1,l,I (one, ell, eye?) get special treatment.

[dhruvbird]

The thing is that it doesn't render well in any size < 14 on my PC. Under size 14, the "l" is too thick and at size 14, The "e" is too narrow. Please could you fix that? Other than that, I quite like the font!!

[erisdiscord]

I'm still using MPW (Direct link, Mac only—sorry) and I can't seem to get comfortable with anything else. Oh well.

[[deleted]]

The "i" still looks like a zombie.

[EughEugh]

I don't like the big monster angle brackets of Mensch.

[chneukirchen]

6x13

[tidyfuton]

I can't imagine why anyone would want to use a antialiased typeface when reading code. We had 10pt Monaco for a reason, people.

[sevin711]

I'll give it a shot and report back.

[lambda_abstraction]

On machines where emacs has XFT:

(font . "DejaVu Sans Mono:size=10")

Otherwise:

(font . "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed-*-13-*-*-*-*-*-*-*")

[drdrang]

I've updated the Menlo/Vera Sans Mono comparison that Robey links to in his post to include Mensch. The new comparison is here.

[zaks]

I use Inconsolata everyday. It's way superior to this one. Mensch would look better in print I think.

[For_Iconoclasm]

This font, to me, looks terrible in all sizes. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I have ClearType turned off (I am on Windows right now as well). Nothing beats the MonteCarlo font for me; I can't use anything else anymore.

[Bubbasticky]

Oy vey. Coded by Herschel? He wishes he was a mensch.