[prog] antialiased fonts (was Java/Swing and ...)

[Akkana Peck]

Riccarda Cassini writes:
> P.S.  Does anyone have any recommendations for nice and clean (and 
> preferably free) monospaced/typewriter truetype fonts?
> I have a few lists and tables in the app which look better with
> letter-columns aligning vertically.  Thus, I need to use a monospaced
> font.  The ubiquitous Courier type has never really been on of my
> favorites, so I'm always on the hunt for alternatives.  There don't
> seem to be many around(?)

I was hoping someone else would answer this, since I'm always
looking for a better one myself.  I really really hate Courier.
And I hate trying to read serif fonts at small sizes, even if
it's one that's slightly less ugly than Courier.

My favorite is the Schumacher "clean" font, but it's a bitmapped
font and only a couple of the sizes are nice looking.  And it can't
be antialiased, so that doesn't answer your question.

The best I've found are Andale Mono and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
(the latter is available in bold or medium, roman or italic; the
former seems to be available only in medium roman.)
For some silly reason, the curly lower-case 'l' that they both use
irritates me, but other than that they're quite usable even at small
sizes, and they're okay either with or without antialiasing.

I would very much like to find a font that's at least as pretty
as these, is scalable, and has a full set of characters including
things like those curly-backquotes and non-breaking spaces and
emdashes and all those other characters that Windows and Mac users
are so enamoured of these days.  Windows and Mac don't seem to have
fonts that fit this description either, so it's not a Linux-specific
problem (but perhaps win/mac people don't use fixed-width fonts
much?)

	...Akkana