A while ago, I read my blogging buddy K. Brian Kelley’s entry on what font to use, which led me to another blogging buddy Adam Machanic‘s recommendation on ProFont. I tried it but gave up eventually.
Here are my own three key requirements for fonts:
1. Readability: I want to tell the 0OolI1i and such easily without doubt and confusion;
2. Monospace: I want each letter, punctuation mark, and other symbols to take the same space;
3. Appearance: I want it easy to the eye.
ProFont satisfies the first two requirements. It also has a metallic feel which I like, but it fails my third requirement. Granted, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, to me, it looks a bit crude and unpolished. The font also looks bad when you set it to a bigger size.
The day before yesterday, I was hacking away with some MySQL stuff and read a few MySQL related blogs, which led me to try IRC for the first time. I installed ChatZilla and fired my font question to the VIM channel on freenode.net.
Within a few minutes of time, I got excellent feedbacks. One recommended the Terminus font and Microsoft’s Consolas font. I think Terminus has the same problem as ProFont. Another suggested DeJaVu, which is my font of choice now. The one I picked is DejaVu Sans Mono TrueType. Consolas is not bad either.
How to install TrueType font:
1. Download it;
2. Copy the ttf file to C:\Windows\Fonts;
The IRC chat is interesting. However, in my brief encounter, I saw a profanity-laden shouting match happening on the VMWare channel. I think I will observe a few more days to see if it is valuable to me.
Now I used Yogi Berra’s quotes, let me list a few more. I think the legend got a life of its own and I sometimes wonder how many of those famous quotes really came out of his own mouth. By the way, the Yogi Berra and Yao Ming commercial is pretty funny.
When you come to a fork in a road, take it!
I wish I had an answer to that, because I’m tired of answering that question.
You should always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise, they won’t come to yours.
I couldn’t tell if the streaker was a man or a woman because it had a bag on it’s head.
2 responses to “What font do you use? It’s deja vu all over again”
It depends on what you are doing.
For extended reading, I think the wisdom is that sans-serif fonts are easier on the eyes, unless you are on a screen, where serif fonts reduce strain. (Also, most web sites make their fonts too small.)
For terminal . . . the “monospace” font on Ubuntu works great for me. But, again, I tend to expand the font size to ease eye-strain. Also, light-on-dark is good for fixed-width fonts.
-danny
Thanks for the tips, Danny. I really like the overall look and feel of your site: clean, neat, and easy to read. Maybe it’s time for me to change the theme of this site…