Re: My preference on serifs:

[samizdat]

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.

[Tux]

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.

[samizdat]

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

[tye]

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.