Bit of a subjective question here. When I run CCS (v5.1 beta, BTW) on WinXP, the font for the code editor windows and console defaults to Courier 10 pt. This font is monospaced (or fixed space, if you prefer that term), which is good and running text is quite legible. But it has at least one fatal flaw for programming: regular parentheses, e.g., "(", are nearly indistiguishable (one pixel difference?) from "squiggly brackets", e.g,, "{". (If I were mean, I would have switched the glyphs on you and see if you noticed* :-) Other typical problems for fonts intended for programming include "1" vs. "l", "I" vs. "l", ";" vs. ":", etc.
I've switched my CCS prefs to use Lucida Console 10, which solves all these glyph confusion issues, but it isn't as legible for running text (no serifs, too light an optical weight). I realize that I'm a bit of a font purist (or maybe my eyes are getting more tired with age :-) but does anyone have a suggestion for a better monospace (sigh....) programmer font? (I'll do some searching myself, including on the Mac side, since TrueType and OpenType fonts work cross-platform.)
Mike
Palo Alto, CA
*Just to show how old I am, many years ago at Livermore when Versatec electrostatic printers were first coming out, a department administrator decided to save a few bucks by ordering printers with lower res font ROMs. One of the programmers sent him a lengthy letter, printed on the subject printer, complaining that you couldn't tell "5"s from "S"s, etc. and with programming symbols, you couldn't use context to tell you either. Of course, he progressively substituted more "5"s for "S"s as the letter progressed, with a footnote at the bottom that if the admin didn't notice this, he obviously couldn't tell his "S" from a hole in the ground. Wish I still had a copy :-)
Courier New is my font of choice. I can distinguish different parentheses well enough in addition to the other characters you mentioned. But maybe I am just really used to it?
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I really like Consolas which Microsoft introduced in Vista, I believe--but don't quote me on that. :-) On XP, I think if you install (or have installed) Office 2007 or above, it comes with that, too.
Not sure if the forum S/W will do justice to this screenshot, but...
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. ~Albert Einstein
Thanks for the feedback folks. I did some searching myself and found two useful sites:
Dan Benjamin provides a nice summary: "Top 10 Programming Fonts" at: http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts/ And he goes on to provide a pointer to the winner, a free variant of Consolas, Inconsolata :-) by Dan Levien: http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
And, more importantly (for me at least), the typography team at Microsoft (which now appears to be one of the few remaining pro font teams since Adobe has effectively left the field) provides an antialiasing tuner tool for XP (already built-in Vista and Win7 apparently) at: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/tune.aspx
Appears that my copy of WinXP (a VM running on a Mac under VMware Fusion 4.x) wasn't anti-aliasing properly. The tuner allowed me to fix that as well as fine-tune the system for my LCD.
Ah.... much better now.