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Re: Coder friendly font



Quoting Curt (curty@free.fr):
> On 2015-09-21, Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Monday 21 September 2015 18:16:59 Curt wrote:
> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_%28typeface%29
> >>
> >> "Frutiger (pronounced with a hard g) is a series of typefaces named after
> >> its Swiss designer, Adrian Frutiger. Frutiger is a humanist sans-serif
> >> typeface, intended to be clear and highly legible at a distance or at
> >> small text sizes. A very popular design worldwide, font designer Steve
> >> Matteson described its structure as "the best choice for legibility in
> >> pretty much any situation" at small text sizes, while Erik Spiekermann
> >> named it as "the best general typeface ever"."
> >
> > Sadly, it appears not to be available for Debian, or rather, in the Debian 
> > Wheezy repositories.
> 
> It's copyrighted.  You'd have to buy it (from Adobe, e.g.), I suppose,
> if you wish to use it.
> 
> Still, one of the best, if not the best, font in the world for
> legibility, used everywhere from the Charles de Gaulle airport in France
> to the German Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to Amtrak, is a
> sans-serif font, contrary to what that other guy (who I think owns
> Volkswagen stock) implied.

It's a very pleasing font for display, judging by the wiki page.
I hadn't realised the NHS use it, and it would be interesting to
compare it with the font that was designed IIRC in the 50/60s for
UK Motorway signage (well, it started there, when they realised that
Motorway drivers wouldn't be able to read fingerposts or the
"bubbly"-reflective block capital signs of my childhood).
It's also very legible in running text (deliberately printed a little
large) in this Cancer Screening Programme booklet.

However, as a coding-friendly font, I don't rate it. Unambiguity is
essential here, as it legibility in fixed-spacing.

Currently I find neep as legible as anything on screen. I was
disappointed with the efont somebody suggested a while back.
Neep is well-endowed wrt unicode glyphs, which helps.

Also, bear in mind that I've never (knowingly) seen neep, efont,
terminus etc rendered in ink as opposed to light. So 99.9% of the
usages enumerated on the wiki page are irrelevant to this purpose
(unless NHS staff have it as their screen font, which I doubt).

Cheers,
David.


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