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

[Riccarda Cassini]

Akkana Peck wrote:
> 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.

nice to hear I'm not alone with this pet peeve of mine ;-)


> 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.

Yeah, those are essentially the same fonts I've come across, so far.
The only other (usable) ones I know of are LucidaTypewriter and OCR-B.
Btw, I totally agree with you on that 'l'. Why was that necessary? It
kind of magnetically distracts my eyes.
OCR-B is a slightly de-uglified version of the rather wellknown
(machine-readable) OCR-A.  Very minimalistic and clean. The main
problem is that it doesn't have any umlauts and other special
characters. Also, I don't think it's free. The OCR-B number-glyphs
are actually quite nice in my opinion, which makes the font well
suited for tables with lots of number columns.
The other one, LucidaTypewriter, would actually be a rather nice font,
if there wasn't that irritating 'l' (yes, too - looks different than
that of VeraSansMono, but in no way better).  Okay, enough whining.

I think, some of the fonts are fine in general, it's just that one or
two characters are popping out unnecessarily. It would be great, if one
could simply fix those irritations. This brings me to my next question:

Are there any font editing programs under Linux, remotely similar to
FontLab or Fontographer (i.e. for truetype and/or type1)?  It wouldn't
necessarily have to be that feature-rich - if it does the job at hand,
that's fine.

If so, I might actually give it a try to design a fixed-width font
family trying to avoid the problems of the existing ones (well, the
perceived problems, in my very humble opinion).  Yes, I mean it.

In one of my former jobs I did some font editing stuff. At the time, I
was using FontLab to make some modifications on existing fonts. I never
got around to creating a complete font or font family from scratch, but
I generally have an idea of the amount of work I'd be faced with. The
problem with FontLab is, that it's only available for Windows/Mac, and
that it's simply too expensive for just fiddling around with a couple
of glyphs.

Any suggestions for font editors I could try?

Thanks,

Riccarda



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