Last week, I saw a tweet from @brampitoyo about a new mono­spaced font for pro­gram­mers called Anony­mous Pro.  I can appre­ci­ate a good font, espe­cially one designed with the unique needs of pro­gram­mers in mind.  This font has a few extras built in, too.  The com­mon point sizes used for cod­ing have pre-rendered bitmaps, mak­ing dis­play quick and con­sis­tent.  The designer went out of his way to make sure let­ters and sym­bols were non-ambiguous (for instance the slashed zero ver­sus the for­eign let­ter that looks like an upper­case O with a slash: Ø).

Pre­vi­ous to this, I had been using Vera Sans Mono for my day-to-day edit­ing (a Linux box at work) and Con­so­las and/or Andale Mono on the Mac.  These were picked mainly out of con­ve­nience, avail­abil­ity, and not stray­ing far from defaults.  I never took the effort to copy the Vera Sans fam­ily over to the Mac, and even if I did, I sus­pect I might have found it a bit annoy­ing due to the sub-pixel ren­der­ing dif­fer­ences between the two oper­at­ing sys­tems.  With two dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent fonts, I wouldn’t be notic­ing ren­der­ing differences.

So given that back­ground, I jumped into using Anony­mous Pro for a few days and found I really did not like it.  The char­ac­ters felt a lit­tle too thin and spindly.  The white-on-black of my con­sole win­dows felt tol­er­a­ble, but the black-on-white of my edi­tor win­dows was just a lit­tle to thin to be com­fort­able.  Addi­tion­ally, it felt just a lit­tle too pix­e­lated, but I am not sure if this is how I truly think or if it is just bias creep­ing in from how smoothly Vera Sans Mono ren­ders.  Let me repro­duce a pair of examples:

This is Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono, the font I have been using for the last few years in the Linux world:

This is Anony­mous Pro, the newly released font:

Anony­mous Pro just felt a lit­tle too thin and jagged to be a keeper.  Today, I switched back to Vera Sans Mono.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. A LOSER IS YOU!
2. Find­ing a Nee­dle in a Pornstack
3. “Mr. Jen­nings is not not a super agent. He is an engineer.”
4. FIRE!FIRE!
5. Ummm… Apple? Not so much with the Comic Sans, mkay?

Tagged as: andalemono, anonymous, anonymouspro, coder, fonts, monospaced, programmer, screenshots, verasans, verasansmono