{"id":202,"date":"2008-06-17T13:50:11","date_gmt":"2008-06-17T21:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/?p=202"},"modified":"2008-06-17T13:50:11","modified_gmt":"2008-06-17T21:50:11","slug":"anonymous-font","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/17\/anonymous-font\/","title":{"rendered":"Anonymous Font"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most of what I do on the computer is in a terminal window. I actually bring up gvim to write my sermons, but unless you&#8217;re in the trade, you wouldn&#8217;t see the difference. The point is that less and less do I use fancy graphical interfaces with fonts and so forth to do my work. More and more do I regress back into the comfortable 80&#215;24 existence of my tender years. (Except I prefer something more like 80&#215;35 or 80&#215;40, if I can get it.)<\/p>\n<p>Terminal windows require a monospaced font. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_typefaces#Monospaced\">Monospaced fonts<\/a> are fonts where each letter takes up the same amount of room: a capital I and a lowercase w are equally wide. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/befuddledsenses\/2587678725\/\" title=\"Monospaced Fonts by Mess of Pottage, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3264\/2587678725_40c2fba121_o.png\" width=\"290\" height=\"312\" alt=\"Monospaced Fonts\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The problem is that most of them don&#8217;t work so well. Some are just wrong. For example, Courier New is too spindly to be of any use at all. Others make terminal.app crazy (DejaVu and Liberation, I&#8217;m looking at you). So mostly, I use  &#8220;Monaco&#8221; or &#8220;Lucida Sans Typewriter&#8221;. The problem with those is they aren&#8217;t really programmer fonts: they don&#8217;t help you distinguish between ambiguous glyphs like lowercase L and 1, or capital O and zero (0), like this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/befuddledsenses\/2587701307\/\" title=\"Anonymous Font (letters) by Mess of Pottage, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3141\/2587701307_07d76f2001_o.png\" width=\"114\" height=\"48\" alt=\"Anonymous Font (letters)\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Plus, every programmer worthy of the name wants their typewriter text to look typewriter-y. I used to think this was to be like <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_C_Programming_Language_(book)\">K&#038;R<\/a> (Courier), but later on I realized it was to be like <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Metafont\">Knuth<\/a> (CM Typewriter).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, a couple of years ago, I stumbled onto <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tobias-jung.de\/seekingprofont\/\">profont<\/a>, which seemed like it was exactly what I wanted. But it wasn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>Today, I found Anonymous. Behold:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/befuddledsenses\/2588515000\/\" title=\"Anonymous Font by Mess of Pottage, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3164\/2588515000_7910040354_o.png\" width=\"519\" height=\"301\" alt=\"Anonymous Font\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Light but not spindly. No way to confuse your ones and L&#8217;s. Oh, joy! Raptures!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of what I do on the computer is in a terminal window. I actually bring up gvim to write my sermons, but unless you&#8217;re in the trade, you wouldn&#8217;t see the difference. The point is that less and less do I use fancy graphical interfaces with fonts and so forth to do my work. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRqpr-3g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}