PhotoWalking USA

Len Erickson – Purveyor of Light

The Programmer’s Font

with one comment

Programmer’s have special needs often overlooked, today I’m talking about the Programmer’s Font.

There are three well-known requirements for a font to use in programmer’s editor:

1) It has to be a fixed width font.
2) Visual distinction between letter “O” and zero. Usually zero is “crossed”.
3) Visual distinction between Capital lower case letter “l”, capital letter “I” and number “1″.
In general such a font should be super legible in small point sizes.

I used to use Courier New, but finally found a font that I like much better, Andale Monotype. Microsoft used to distribute that font with IE 5, but now it’s not available for free download anymore.

Another programmer recommended a very nice programmer’s font called “ProFont“. Here’s a site of programming fonts to choose from.

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Written by Len Erickson

December 1, 2005 at 11:43 am

Posted in Uncategorized

One Response

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  1. Very true. I have seen #3 cause hours of problems for some people.. they gotta stick to ye’old Courier New!

    rookiecoder

    May 19, 2008 at 12:09 pm


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