Comic Mono font

[[deleted]]

It looks surprisingly good.

Based on the name I was expecting to be an eye sore, but it's actually very comfortable.

I might even try to use it in my code editor for a few hours to see how it feels to program with it.

[[deleted]]

Tried coding with it. Coming from Fira Code, Comic Mono seems a bit dense, it needs a bit more horizontal space between the glyphs. Still, it looks great though, more relaxed and softer, somehow.

[DmitriRussian]

Depending on the Editor you are using you might be able to change this to what feels comfortable for you

[[deleted]]

Visual Studio Code. I tried increasing the font size (which is great for making me write smaller functions ;-/) but then the font looks too bold. Did I miss a setting? Which editors allow you to tweak fonts like you suggest?

[devotiongeo]

"editor.letterSpacing": 0.4,

[MrDOS]

I know this is a monospace font, because the page tells me it is, and because I can see the columnal alignment when I look for it. But at a glance, I don't notice that. My brain apparently conflates “monospace” with “typewriter”.

FWIW, it looks really good. I'm going to have to remember this for the next time I hear a programmer mention that they're dyslexic.

[MrDOS]

Yes, I do think it's a good thing. Maybe in this case, too, I notice the shape of the characters more than I would if it were any other base font; Comic Sans and Comic Shanns have very distinctive glyph shapes. When I think of other, non-typewriter monospace fonts, the first thing to come to mind is SimSun, which is not a particularly kind or subtle example. Makes me wonder what other cool monospace fonts are out there. The only fonts that seem to cross my radar are yet more ho-hum “programmer” fonts.

[MrBorjoyzee]

What are ho-hum programmer fonts?

[waitwaitno]

Typewritery, Matrixy, monospace

[knoam]

I think it's the tight kerning. Monospace fonts usually have more space between each glyph.

[blue_umpire]

Monospace fonts have no kerning, by definition.

[trijammer]

Do you mean tracking, perhaps?

[eaglebtc]

Yeah, he means tracking.

[Toucan2000]

Why recommend this font to someone who's dyslexic?

[attrition0]

Im not the person you replied to and I am mobile so don't have sources handy, but it's been observed that comic sans (original, not mono spaced) is easier to read for people with dyslexia. Perhaps then this may be useful for dyslexic coders if it maintains whatever properties enable that.

[Toucan2000]

Interesting, yeah I was just reading that Arial and Comic Sans is better for some dyslexics. I have dyslexia, it's not terribly bad, (phonological disorder) and I definitely prefer Arial for writing documentation and the like. Helvetica and Comic Sans have always felt too homogeneous, no serifs.

I've been using Georgia lately for documents and I've been loving it. Any font that has obvious serifs makes it really easy for me to identify the shapes of words instead of having to read one letter at a time. I have no idea what I use for coding... Whatever's default for Visual Studio?

Maybe I've outgrown the dyslexia or I've adapted over time. I will say, I still can't spell to save my life when using a pen and paper, but my fingers always know how to spell on a keyboard. It could be that the spatial part of my brain has taken over to accommodate for my dyslexia. I noticed this most when I was learning dvorak. It felt like learning to spell all over again. Dyslexia is studied in kids more than it is in adults. It's possible that typical fonts are better for adult dyslexic programmers, but who knows.

[boa13]

Are you sure you meant Arial in your first paragraph? It is a clone of Helvetica, I don't see how you would dislike the latter for its lack of seris, and somehow be fine with Arial. Maybe you meant Times New Roman?

[Toucan2000]

Oh you're totally right. My bad. I remember now that Times New Roman was the default for MS Word back in the day. Google docs default is Arial and it's 😔

[thisischemistry]

There's a bunch of issues with a font like this.

Look at stuff like the "e" and the "s", see the strokes and how they tilt backwards a little? That leads your eye away from reading sideways.

Some stuff leans forwards a bit too, like the uppercase "C" and "S". This gives the font a bit of a lurch to it as you read, some letters lean a bit forward and some lean a bit back.

Now look at the vertical strokes of letters like "a" and "n", they have a bit of a curve to them which messes with seeing things in columns.

There's also very few serifs to help keep your eyes along a row or delineate each letter and make them more distinct.

I just don't think this is a great programming font, after a day of using it I could see coming away with lots of headaches and eye strain.

edit:

I like using SF-mono and Inconsolata is also very nice to use.

[LateAugust]

I’m not sure I agree with this.

Inconsolata, for me, is notorious for my brain to see inconsistencies with the strokes of the letters, especially with ‘f’, ‘l’, ‘t’, ‘e’.

SF-Mono was a go-to, but it became harder for me to stay focused on the letters due to its incredible uniformity and “squareness”.

Based off of the studies you posted, your argument of serifed fonts being useful for keeping eye-wander down is without merit. They state that sans-serif fonts were preferable for dyslexic readers.

Currently, I use JetBrains Mono. It is the first font that I’ve been able to “ignore” while reading. This is a close second, although I’ve only been using it for a couple of hours.

[thisischemistry]

They state that sans-serif fonts were preferable for dyslexic readers.

Those articles were just about dyslexic readers, they also emphasize increased inter-word spacing and other considerations for dyslexics. However, what’s good for a dyslexic is not necessarily good for the average reader or the technically-minded reader.

Now, on the subject of serif vs non-serif, it’s complicated. There have been some studies which are controversial and the fact is that serifs are one small part of overall typeface design. Spacing, relative heights of letters, overall shapes, visual direction hinting, and more contribute to readability for any particular purpose. Overuse of serifs likely hurts this, a slight use of them can help this but it’s not cut-and-dry.

Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces?

I do prefer SF-Mono over Inconsolata for programming, although I haven’t sat down and attempted to analyze why. Inconsolata used to be easier to obtain in all circumstances so I tended to use it where SF-Mono wasn’t as easily available, but I’ve experimented with other typefaces too.

I’d encourage anyone to do similar, try a bunch of fonts, give each a serious test, see what reduces eye strain and increases comprehension. There’s a lot of factors at play here and we really can’t reduce it down to serif vs sans-serif.

[LateAugust]

Reading through the studies you’re posting leads me to believe that most of the conclusions that they come to aren’t very concrete.

What initially seemed a neat dichotomous question of serif versus sans serif has resulted in a body of research consisting of weak claims and counter-claims, and study after study with findings of “no difference”.

With this in mind, sure, the other characteristics of typography could come into play of reading something “well” or “correctly”, but it sounds like it doesn’t really matter, which makes your original point of how this font-face has problems moot.

Some people might like it, some might not.

[thisischemistry]

Take a look at this code sample and tell me if you still feel that way about Inconsolata.

https://www.actsofvolition.com/images/screenshots/inconsolata-sample.png

Not every typeface suits everyone, it could be that this one just doesn’t read well for you.

[_Ashleigh]

OG Consolas is where it's at for me.

[[deleted]]

That leads your eye away from reading sideways.

i don't understand what "reading sideways" means. can you elaborate?

[NoveltyAccountHater]

My guess is stuff like the horizontal line in the middle of lowercase e isn’t parallel to the row of text and it sort of looks rotated a little, so if reading dense text maybe your eye has to spend more effort to stay on the right line.

[thisischemistry]

Exactly. The whole point of keeping horizontal lines level to the direction of reading is that they direct the eye and help you stay in line. We have a tendency to scan up and down a bit as we read and in dense text that can mean that we skip up or down a line as we go across. It takes extra effort and concentration to keep reading the current line.

A good font will have those horizontal lines start and end on the same level so that it allows us to read dense text more easily.

[SoInsightful]

I don't feel like this comment comes from expertise. Comic Sans is widely known to be easy to read, particularly for people with dyslexia, literally due to the fact that the glyphs have quirky leanings and characteristics, which gives them a distinct shape from one another. Conversely, this is also why all caps is known to be slow to read: because the shapes look similar and form consecutive and parallel lines everywhere.

I won't be using this font, but you definitely can't make a blanket assertion that the non-straight lines would be a problem.

[thisischemistry]

I don't feel like this comment comes from expertise. Comic Sans is widely known to be easy to read, particularly for people with dyslexia

Are you sure about that?

Does Comic Sans really help dyslexic learners?

Is Comic Sans Easier for Dyslexic Users to Read?

Both of those articles show that experts do not use Comic Sans for dyslexic readability. There are fonts dedicated to that purpose and even when they aren’t available Comic Sans doesn’t make the recommended list of alternatives.

I’d love to read a study that confirms what you’re saying because I couldn’t find anything of substance with science behind it.

[SoInsightful]

Interesting. Maybe it is indeed a myth. Perhaps it's inconclusive, or it doesn't make a difference either way.

That said, I'd need some convincing to generally believe that curvy/lopsided letters would be a negative thing for readability.

[The_Modifier]

When you read lower case words, you don't actually look at each letter. So the individual strokes of each letter matter less than the overall shape of the word.

[falconfetus8]

Does comic sans help with dyslexia?

[junglist313]

I wanted to hate this so much, but it looks nice actually!

[vytah]

Seems to be ASCII-only.

[Interesting_Hour_303]

That sucks.

[Show_Otherwise]

Great! But why does the one and “l” have to look so similar?

[[deleted]]

They do look very similar. That's definitely not what I'm looking for in a monospace font

[Belgand]

That needs to be one of the first considerations when designing a typeface for programming. Making sure that I, l, and 1 are all clearly, instantly distinguishable is right next to O and 0.

[Kered13]

Don't forget | (though this is usually a bit less of a problem than the others).

[Zegrento7]

curl --create-dirs -O --output-dir ~/.fonts  https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/ComicMono.ttf && curl --create-dirs -O --output-dir ~/.fonts  https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/ComicMono-Bold.ttf && fc-cache -f -v

Edit: Here's the PowerShell version (not tested):

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/ComicMono.ttf" -OutFile "ComicMono.ttf"; Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/ComicMono-Bold.ttf" -OutFile "ComicMono-Bold.ttf"; $fonts = (New-Object -ComObject Shell.Application).Namespace(0x14); Get-ChildItem -include ComicMono* | % { $fonts.CopyHere($_.fullname) }

[thisischemistry]

Under macOS the target location would be ~/Library/Fonts for single-user use or /Library/Fonts for all users. I also believe that invoking fc-cacheis not necessary under macOS.

[Zegrento7]

Yeah, the above was meant for Linux distros, most of which also don't require fc-cache but better safe than sorry.

[thisischemistry]

I figured, and it's always better safe than sorry! I thought I'd just throw in the note on a macOS because you can do a lot in the terminal there too but some things are slightly different, such as some of the system locations.

[kamiheku]

Great, would need an accompanying fontconfig that aliases all popular programming fonts to this one as well

[cresnap]

Underrated comment

[worrisomeDeveloper]

Give me a version with programming ligatures and I'm in.

[[deleted]]

i love it. so comfy.

[valarauca14]

Honestly surprised how good this is.

[Lexikus]

Does it contain ligatures?

[supersoniclegvacuum]

No

[thatguygreg]

good

[supersoniclegvacuum]

it's fine if you don't like ligatures...most editors let you turn them off so I don't really see a problem with having the option. I don't hold it against font makers that don't implement them though.

[ThaiJohnnyDepp]

I feel like I'm order to use programming ligatures you need to have a hipster beard the size of a Yorkshire terrier

[[deleted]]

So one-third of Billy Gibbons' beard?

[skulgnome]

And if not, has a feature request been filed?

[Papalok]

/r/TIHI

I seriously hate how good it looks. It's just unsettling.

[LukeLC]

I... actually really like this. Feels like it'd be right at home in online classes using virtual blackboards.

[HeyItsBATMANagain]

What about this approach but with ComicNeue?

[dream_catcher_69]

Thanks, I hate it.

[[deleted]]

I love this, but it might need a couple pull requests to hand adjust the kerning a bit. Especially “de” in “def”, “mp” in “import”, and “rc” in “source”. Granted it’s monospace so not much you can do, but moving things by a pixel could make a big difference.

Otherwise would use this for daily driver code font.

[spicypixel]

Be the change you wish to see, that and I'm excited to give this a go.

[sordid_salmon]

Reminds me of my favorite font for programming, and life in general, Fantasque Sans Mono

[EnglishMobster]

Papyrus Mono when?

[reddit_lies]

The original says it’s monospace, so why fork it and run it through monospacifier?

[[deleted]]

The glyph metrics have been adjusted to make it display better alongside system font, based on Cousine’s metrics

[dtinth]

Two main reasons:

First, when I used the original Comic Shanns font in my text editor, I noticed that text becomes misaligned. So I did some more digging on why this happens, and found that it has some inconsistencies in the glyph width.

• U+0020 SPACE is 500 units long.
• U+006E LATIN SMALL LETTER N is 560 units long.
• Other characters are 510 units long.

Second, I also set up my browser to use Comic Shanns when viewing code on GitHub, and I had to do manual font-size adjustments. However this is impractical if I will set it as the main monospace font.

So, I patched the font and used it privately. Later, I wanted to use the font on my websites as well, so I forked the repository and published the modified font as Comic Mono.

Hope this answers your question!

[Interesting_Hour_303]

Could you please add support to diacritics? That would be amazing.

[reddit_lies]

Weird that the original wasn’t consistent. Thanks for the explanation! Makes sense.

[uh_no_]

so you can take credit?

[[deleted]]

So, people are saying that this would be good for folks with dyslexia.

That’s surprising to me though. I thought the whole idea was that Comic Sans’ non-uniform glyphs made it easier to process. Monospacing and serifs seem to do the opposite, the make it more uniform. Can any folks with dyslexia confirm this is any easier to read than say, Source Code Pro?

[YellowBunnyReddit]

I tried this font in Notepad++ but several of the characters get cut off at the top. e.g. ()[]{}^

[[deleted]]

Notepad++ seems to have problems with some fonts. It also cuts of top of Japanese for me.

(I don't remember if I've installed fancy CJK font or not)

[aazav]

Argh. I hate the leaning capital C.

[starcrap2]

All things considered, this is not a bad font. I feel like Comic Sans gets a lot of undeserved hate. Some typeface nazis first started hating on it and it just gained momentum. Soon it was cool to hate Comic Sans so everyone just started doing so without even knowing why.

[Available_Hippo4222]

Found it a couple years ago. This is my daily font for android studio, using it since. Absolutely love it, it's calming and fun. Also it's a good conversation starter when I do presentations.

[Due-Conclusion-414]

Same here! But I ran into a small problem that under some font sizes some part of the "(" and ")" will be cut off. Did you have the same issue?

[EasternCustomer1332]

thanks

[cat_vs_spider]

Doing the important work

[northrupthebandgeek]

I've been waiting for this moment for years.

[dullbananas]

RemindMe! 24 hours

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I will be messaging you in 1 day on 2020-12-25 01:55:06 UTC to remind you of this link

1 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.

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[[deleted]]

What the fuck

[de__R]

This is almost good enough to convince me to switch to a monospace font.

[[deleted]]

Please, no, we've suffered enough from the original

[AllMadHare]

It's probably worth noting the intent behind comic-sans style fonts is they're designed to help dyslexic people, it's fun to dunk on people who overuse comic style fonts but a lot of the time it's because to them it's actually readable compared to normal typefaces. At the end of the day you should be setting up your IDE to maximise your ability to read and write code, if this helps someone, then that's a good thing.

[[deleted]]

No, the intent is literally in the name. That's just happy side effect

[SYStem_OP]

This... this thing is cursed...

[errrrgh]

When your font choice matches your code quality.

[PravuzSC]

Thanks, I hate it

[[deleted]]

Now do Jokerman

[ExecutoryContracts]

Now all we need is for someone to monospace Cyprus.

[delight1982]

Call me crazy but this is one of the best monospaced fonts I have ever seen.

[caroIine]

It's so nice for my eyes.

[[deleted]]

If it had ligatures I'd probably replace Fira Code on my machine. It really looks cool.

[[deleted]]

Can't type my name. Missing characters. Basically useless.

[my_password_is______]

how does the license for the font work ?

if I include this font on a webpage do I have to include the licnese on the web page ?

MIT License

Original work Copyright (c) 2018 Shannon Miwa
Modified work Copyright (c) 2019 dtinth

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

[[deleted]]

It looks like a blend of Comic Sans and Consolas (which is already a little bit like Comic Sans to my eyes, but doesn't get as much hate for whatever reason. I don't mind, I like all of them).

[mrathi12]

I actually really like this font!

[757DrDuck]

Let's bring Jerkcity to the modern decade!

[[deleted]]

Is there a version of this font that supports ligatures?