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There's a couple of good questions regarding screen fonts for coding.

I'm putting together some Keynote presentations that will contain

  • code fragments

  • screen dumps of terminal windows

And the usual Courier display is looking a bit tired.

What are some good fonts for each of these? I'm especially interested in the terminal window dumps, to make sure they are legible. Or perhaps I can cut and paste the characters from the terminal window and apply some formatting to make it look screen-dumpish?

My main goal are

  • legible on screen and in printed outlines

  • the screen dump especially should be legible, but still identifiable as a screen dump

  • demonstrate I'm a person of visual taste and refinement, lol.

Robert Harvey
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Mark Harrison
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8 Answers8

87

I prefer Consolas.

Andrew Weir
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31

If you are doing a presentation, and you don't care about anything lining up, Verdana is a good choice.

If you are going to distribute your presentation, use a font that you know is on everyone's machine, since using something else is going to cause the machine to fall back to one of the common fonts (like Arial or Times) anyway.

If you do care about things lining up, and are not distributing the presentation, consider Consolas:

alt text
(source: typepad.com)

It is highly legible, reminiscent of Verdana, and is monospaced. The color choices are, of course, a matter of taste.

Glorfindel
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Robert Harvey
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28

I do a lot of such presentation and use Monaco for code and Chalkboard for text (within a template that, overall, has only small changes from the Blackboard one supplied with Keynote). Look at any of my presentations' PDFs (e.g. this one) and you can decide whether you like the effect.

Alex Martelli
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    I really love Monaco for code. But Chalkboard? Ooof. – molf Jun 21 '09 at 00:25
  • Thanks Alex, this looks quite nice. Interestingly my presentations will be about Python as well. – Mark Harrison Jun 21 '09 at 00:30
  • @Mark, Great! As you may notice I sacrifice some readability (short var names, &c) in order to fit entire functions and classes on one readable slide (sometimes I explicitly apologize for that;-) -- in some other languages I wouldn't even try, but Python, Perl, Ruby, SQL, allow one such luxury;-). – Alex Martelli Jun 21 '09 at 02:30
  • @molf, Chalkboard is the heart of the Apple-designed Blackboard template for Keynote, and it works great for me -- of course the text up there is a mere concise summary of what I'm saying in the presentation (look for my full name on Google Video for some examples), if I was basically reading the slides I might feel otherwise (but then that would be a problem in itself;). – Alex Martelli Jun 21 '09 at 02:32
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    @Alex, if a template is designed by Apple doesn't mean it's good. :-) Still, +1 for Monaco. – molf Jun 21 '09 at 12:20
  • @moif, granted, but Apple's graphic designers definitely have better taste than I do -- hey, they'd better! Apple's whole business model hinges on great visual design (and other aspects of user experience), while _my_ own "superpower" is software development and management thereof, _not_ visual design;-) – Alex Martelli Jun 21 '09 at 15:58
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    eh, Chalkboard ~= Comic sans?! http://bancomicsans.com/home.html – Carl Hörberg Jul 14 '09 at 10:19
  • All the Apple's non-mobile devise fonts make me think I am reading a comic – Arthur Feb 17 '17 at 21:46
16

I'm personally very fond of Inconsolata

baudtack
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7

Do you want people to focus on the content, and demonstrate that you're a person of taste and good sense? Stay with Courier. Don't innovate just because you can (otherwise, why not craft exquisite animations for every slide transition, with dancing letters...?).

Courier has several advantages:

  1. Excellent readability in low resolutions.
  2. Fixed width preserves indentation.
  3. Serifed fonts link letters, allowing people to understand words and identifiers as a whole (gestalt perception). Nonserifed fonts should only be used for headlines.
  4. Tried and true: people will immediately understand it's code.

If you want to dump point 4, at least choose an alternative that preserves points 1-3. Never allow form to trump function.

Pontus Gagge
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  • Don't agree, innovate otherwise we'd still be using sticks in the sand to write. – rhody Sep 11 '20 at 00:01
  • It's a common mistake to confuse "new" and "innovative". Argue the benefits of the alternatives: nothing is good just because it's new, nor just because it's old. – Pontus Gagge Sep 12 '20 at 09:57
  • Have you tried sublime text, I found the font on that is Very readable, better that courier. The point is that if you don’t try new things you’ll never know if they are useful or not. Take a risk, try something new. – rhody Sep 14 '20 at 16:16
3
  • Lucida Console (good, but a little short)
  • Lucida Sans Typewriter (taller, smaller character set)
  • Andale Mono is very clear

But this has been answered here before.

Community
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lavinio
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  • It's a different question... the requirements for a good font for coding and a good font for presentations about coding are quite different. Unless you do extreme team coding, you don't need the coding font to be visible by hundreds of people projected on a screen in an auditorium. :-) – Mark Harrison Jul 14 '09 at 22:58
3

I use DejaVu Sans Mono at Size 16.

UPDATE : I have switched to Envy Code R for coding and Anonymous Pro for terminal

Ibn Saeed
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1

I like Calibri.

Geo
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