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in reply to My preference on serifs:

Serif's Up! What? Oh, okay, I'll put away my board. Back to work in my serif's cube.

Depends on the weight of the font, too. My company mandates the use of an abominable sans-serif 44-pt font called Arial Black for all presentations, and it's all squished together into unreadability.

Personally, for presentation and docs, I like to use a wide serif font called (on M$) Bookman Old Style, with a few tenths of a point more width between characters. Even better, Railroad Roman. Of course, I grew up loving trains, so that's a no-brainer.

For code, however, I want a monospaced sans-serif font. I like ScITE as an editor because I can chose from a wide variety of fonts. I agree there's a definite issue with character confusion; haven't found a solution for that.

Don Wilde
"There's more than one level to any answer."

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Re^2: My preference on serifs:
by Tux (Canon) on Apr 29, 2008 at 14:04 UTC

    Liberation font family comes with Liberation Mono, which has very distinguishable 1, l, and I. It also has a little more line space than Lucida Console, so it reads with more air.

    For matching document text, there is Liberation Sans. The only problem I have with that is that there is still some strange kerning issues, but at least it is freely available for both *nix and M$Winblows, so all documents look the same. And it reads perfect for headings as well as for long running text. I now also use it for all fonts in my browser (yes, "serif" is mapped to "Liberation Sans")

    With these fonts, I see no excuse left to stick to any serif font, except maybe for the occasional header in some glossy advertisement nobody wants to read anyway.


    Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
      Ummm... well, it's certainly usable. Certainly the license is better than a proprietary license. My editor (ScITE) boldfaces a number of keywords, and those look (let's be charitable) amateurish.

      Fortunately, since it's "open source," there's an opening for somebody to create "ReallyLiberating" as an update to "Liberation"... :D

      Don Wilde
      "There's more than one level to any answer."
Re^2: My preference on serifs: (1,l,I)
by tye (Sage) on May 01, 2008 at 16:21 UTC
    I agree there's a definite issue with character confusion; haven't found a solution for that.

    Looking for the last "font for programmers" that I tried, a quick google search turned up http://typographica.org/000744.php which contains links to it and several other alternatives. Enjoy.

    - tye