MS has a bunch of new fonts, designed for LCDs (with ClearType). They're getting serious about making them look great. The one I'm interested in is Consolas, the new monospaced font for programmers.
I'm now using it in all my IDEs. It's very legible and comfortable on the eyes even at small font sizes. Nice and narrow, so C programmers (and web too) don't have so many wrapped lines.
Optimized for Microsoft ClearType. The Microsoft Consolas Font Family is a set of highly legible fonts designed for ClearType. This installation package will set the default font for Visual Studio to Consolas. Consolas is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and business correspondence.
Optimizing the font specifically for ClearType allowed a design with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts like Courier. This allows for more comfortable reading of extended text on-screen.
Apparently Consolas looks like crap without subpixel smoothing (ClearType) enabled, so if you're not running a big LCD with ClearType, don't expect too much.
why o why they published a font as EXE ... anyhow, installed under virtual machine and copied fonts to linux - works like a charm .. (1680x1050 20" lcd - with subpixel rendering tuned on in fedora)
why o why they published a font as EXE ... anyhow, installed under virtual machine and copied fonts to linux - works like a charm .. (1680x1050 20" lcd - with subpixel rendering tuned on in fedora)
I have some windoze boxes though, and I have windoze installed on my main Linux machine in a VirtualBox VM, so it wasn't too big a deal for me to get the font into Linux (not that I do much MCU development in Linux...).
all boxes here are under linux (ok, one is under osx) .. and no vmware but virtualbox for virtualisation ... the font is nice .. still not sure if I'm going to keep it or not
(yeah, /me gave up on linux for electronics too .. )
He can after he installs it, but if he doesn't have a Windows system at all, that's no help.
I'm not certain why there's a question why MicroSoft is distributing it's free font with an EXE that can only be installed under it's own operating system. It's not M$'s job to support alternate operating systems, in fact quite the opposite.
Once installed you may be able to copy the fonts off the machine, but who know's what MS has done to break the font standards so it doesn't work on other machines. I'd hunt it down and post it but I think the MS lawsuit squad would come after me.
Futz linked the install file from Microsofts website in the original post here. The font does show up in the c:\windows\fonts directory if you want to use it on another OS or what not, mind you due to Microsofts lovely standard EULA this is technically illegal, or I'd post it.