Apple Menlo: Snow Leopard's New Console Font

http://typophile.com/node/58625#comment-351070

by tptacek • 17 years ago

11 25 17 years ago

typophile.com

tptacek7• 17 years ago

Yawn.

Compare to Prelude, an entire sans serif family Palm commissioned from Font Bureau: http://typophile.com/node/58935

First Microsoft, now Palm; Apple, you really need to raise your game here.

Kejistan• 17 years ago

Sorry, I don't understand the comparison? How does Prelude have much to do with Apple's 'new' terminal font? And how does Microsoft play into this?

tptacek7• 17 years ago

Apple has famous typographic literacy and graphic design taste.

But Microsoft, with a far worse reputation for taste, has employed famous typographers for each major release of its OS, contributing serious, important typefaces. Vista included Lucas de Groot's Calibri and Consolas, for instance.

Even Palm, a relatively minor company, has a real face commissioned for the Pre.

But Apple's new typeface is just a tweak of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Linux's open source monospace sans?

kevbin5• 17 years ago

Menlo is nice. I use it as the default in Xcode, Terminal, and Safari under 10.6. It looks to have been tweaked from Bitstream Vera Sans for Quartz's anti-aliasing—like Consolas was tweaked from TheSansMono for Cleartype. The letter forms in TheSansMono are the most beautiful—if you're printing a program listing or samples for a book buy and use TheSansMono—Consolas is the sharpest, easiest to read on Windows LCDs, but looks funny on Macs; Menlo is clearer and easier to read on Macs than Consolas. If you want to use the same font set on Mac, Windows, Linux, et al, the Liberation fonts are the best plan; Liberation Mono is pretty, consistent, and doesn't morph too much between renderers.

dflock• 17 years ago

The Droid family from Ascender, which Google commissioned for Android is uniformly excellent, renders well everywhere I've seen it and is Apache Licensed. I'm currently using 'Droid Sans' as a system UI font (on Linux) and 'Droid Sans Mono' for coding, terminals, etc... In fact I've just aliased the linux 'sans', 'mono', etc... to the appropriate Droid face.

More info here, including the link to the git repo if you want to check the fonts out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_fonts

these are in the Ubuntu repo's as 'ttf-droid' or you can do a straight download from here:

http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-font-family-courtes...

kevbin5• 17 years ago

I think Droid and Liberation are siblings, from the same designer & foundry. Liberation has more variations (italic, bold italic) and more "flourishes" (like in the uppercase Q, lowercase a and what not).

mikedouglas• 17 years ago

Could you upload a screenshot of Xcode+Menlo?

lamnk• 17 years ago

For console fonts nothing beats Terminus, period.

http://www.is-vn.bg/hamster/

tdavis• 17 years ago

FWIW, I found Pragmata to be a solid investment; best console font I've used.

http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm

quizbiz2• 17 years ago

What is the blue/red?

TrevorJ2• 17 years ago

He's overlaying the two fonts to compare the differences.

TrevorJ2• 17 years ago

I like the fact that Apple was willing to tweak something in a fairly minor (from the outside) way in order to make it work just that much better.

Apple Menlo: Snow Leopard's New Console Font

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