Posted by Stephen Auerbach on December 21, 2006 at 06:42:59:
I used to use the EditPad text editor and still get his newsletter. I thought this group would be interested in this:
Tips & Tricks: Another Great Font for Programmers =================================================
Seems my love affair with the Consolas font (see last month's newsletter) may be short-lived! A reader pointed out that the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font available on the Gnome website at http://www.gnome.org/fonts/ is also excellent for programming.
I installed it, and everything I said about Consolas also applies to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. The font looks great with ClearType, but not so good without it. It is perfectly monospaced when mixing bold and plain variants, so your columns always line up. It's a sans-serif font, so easy to read on the screen. Oh, zero, one and el are all easy to distinguish.
Which one to use is mainly a matter of taste. For a given font size, Consolas has smaller characters with more whitespace between them, and a slash through the zero. The Bitstream font has larger tightly spaced characters, and a dot inside the zero. "Consolas" sounds like the name of a Spanish beauty, while "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" is a mouthful.
The Bitstream Vera font collection can be freely distributed in its unmodified form. To install it on your Windows PC, drag and drop the .ttf files from your zip utility into the C:\Windows\Fonts folder. They'll be instantly available in all applications. Make sure to look under "B" for Bitstream rather than "V" for Vera.
The package also includes Bitstream Vera Sans which is a sans serif font like Arial, and Bitstream Vera Serif which is a serif font like Times New Roman. Both are proportionally spaced.