Deliver me from Courier
Apr. 1st, 2004 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athelindAs I wait for the Melatonin to kick in, let me blather a bit about fonts. Monospaced fonts, in particular.
I use monospaced fonts for several different purposes. I use them in my chat clients, because some MUCKs still make use of ASCII maps, and a proportional font will make that sort of thing unreadable. I use them for Figlets in e-mail now and then -- which of course gets munged in the fancy-format HTML mail that keeps forcing its way into my system. I play a lot of paper-and-pencil RPGs, and I like to make ASCII character sheets instead of using photocopies or printing out PDFs. I like to have copies of my characters on my hard drive, and I often e-mail them. ASCII sheets are easily updated, take a trivial amount of space, and can be read on almost any machine.
That said... I think Courier and Courier New are ugly as hell.
On my own system, I use Andale Mono, a sans serif fixed-width font that used to be part of Microsoft's "True Type Core Fonts For The Web". Alas, that program is discontinued. Lucida Console is nearly identical to Andale, however, and is part and parcel of newer versions of Windows. Both are nice, clear, legible screen fonts, and look good in print.
However, I also print out hard copies of those ASCII character sheets, and I've long sought a monospaced font that's not quite so... stark. A character for a fantasy game like Ironclaw doesn't look quite right in a high-tech console font like Andale Mono. If I played a space game, I could easily find something that looked more ultra-tech, but until recently, I've had no luck finding something both ornate and legible -- at least not as freeware.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, I found a font that looks great printed out. It's both moderately ornate and extremely legible.
It's called Monofur
The name intrigued me, so I checked a little deeper. Sure enough, it's based on a proportional font called Eurofurence, which was created for the European furry conventioin the mid-1990s.
And I'm using it to print sheets for an anthropomorphic RPG.
Small world, innit?
Sleepy now. Melatonin just kickedzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
I use monospaced fonts for several different purposes. I use them in my chat clients, because some MUCKs still make use of ASCII maps, and a proportional font will make that sort of thing unreadable. I use them for Figlets in e-mail now and then -- which of course gets munged in the fancy-format HTML mail that keeps forcing its way into my system. I play a lot of paper-and-pencil RPGs, and I like to make ASCII character sheets instead of using photocopies or printing out PDFs. I like to have copies of my characters on my hard drive, and I often e-mail them. ASCII sheets are easily updated, take a trivial amount of space, and can be read on almost any machine.
That said... I think Courier and Courier New are ugly as hell.
On my own system, I use Andale Mono, a sans serif fixed-width font that used to be part of Microsoft's "True Type Core Fonts For The Web". Alas, that program is discontinued. Lucida Console is nearly identical to Andale, however, and is part and parcel of newer versions of Windows. Both are nice, clear, legible screen fonts, and look good in print.
However, I also print out hard copies of those ASCII character sheets, and I've long sought a monospaced font that's not quite so... stark. A character for a fantasy game like Ironclaw doesn't look quite right in a high-tech console font like Andale Mono. If I played a space game, I could easily find something that looked more ultra-tech, but until recently, I've had no luck finding something both ornate and legible -- at least not as freeware.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, I found a font that looks great printed out. It's both moderately ornate and extremely legible.
It's called Monofur
The name intrigued me, so I checked a little deeper. Sure enough, it's based on a proportional font called Eurofurence, which was created for the European furry conventioin the mid-1990s.
And I'm using it to print sheets for an anthropomorphic RPG.
Small world, innit?
Sleepy now. Melatonin just kickedzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 04:48 am (UTC)Thanks for the Monofur link, I'll be sure to check that out.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 08:32 am (UTC)Word of warning:
Like a few other ornate-monospaced fonts I've found, Monofur isn't entirely well-behaved. My text editor of preference is Editpad Lite, and it doesn't like Monofur at all. It works just fine in Notepad, however, and in Wordpad.
Also, if you install Monofur Italic, it somehow sets itself up as the default Monofur font, and you'll never be able to use the NON-italic flavor. Just install Monofur Regular, and if you want italics, just let the system calculate it.