A Better Font
This is going to be a quick post about a tiny detail that I feel makes for a big increase in happiness for a lot of people.
A lot of computer users, when using text editors or any other application that use monospaced (having the same width for every character, useful for programming and related tasks) fonts to render text (source code, plain text, e-mails, markup, etc.), stick with the default font. On some platforms, notably Mac OS X and most modern Linux distributions, this default font is a fairly reasonable and attractive typeface like Monaco or Monospace. On Windows XP and Vista, however, the default monospaced is Courier New.
Courier New, 10pt
Recently, Microsoft released several new fonts with its new operating system, Vista. One of these fonts is a monospaced font specifically designed for programming, called Consolas. This font, and a few other nice fonts, is available by default in Vista and Office 2007, and can also be downloaded as part of the Office Compatibility Pack for free.
Consolas, 10pt
Isn’t that better?
The only caveat is that Consolas is designed with ClearType font smoothing in mind, and if you do not have ClearType enabled, then things will look very ugly.
Cool, I’ll have to try Consolas out. My main programming font of choice has been Dina, and occasionally I use the Proggy Tiny font when I really need to see a ton of code on one screen.
I have noticed one downside to Consolas, which I use in Access 2007 as my default DataSheet font. Access 2007 appears to use a simple XOR for highlighting text. Due to the very aggressive use of ClearType for Consolas, the white-on-black text that results from XORing the highlighted text in Access 2007 renders as “rainbow-on-black”.