Some modern fonts come with built-in features that allow you to select alternate glyph or activate or deactivate some ligatures. For example Source Code Pro puts a dot in the centre of the zero to mark it, but if you tell it, it you can have a slash instead. Fira Code is the reverse.
Which is only visible if you happen to have the fonts installed, and a browser that can do the rendering trick, but if you do then you will see the difference above. Most useful to know. I prefer slashed zeros, some people prefer the dot versions, and I particularly like the left to right slash, rather than the far more common right to left.
Over a decade ago I wrote about fonts: Monospaced Fonts. Fonts are still a strange thing. I have an even larger collection of them now, but I only use a few at most. The one area that I do care about are the monospaced or fixed width font that I use. I use fixed pitch fonts a lot, all my important work is either done in a console window, or is programming which I prefer to use a monospaced font even in a fancy IDE.
The problem was that font designers don't seem to care all that much about
monospaced fonts, most people don't have a use for them, so there weren't that
many to choose from relative to proportional fonts. Additionally in programming
it's important to clearly see the difference between "l", "1", "i", "I"
,
and "0", "o", "O"
. The less commonly used punctuation
characters are additionally more important than normal text, and some
puncutuation mark combinations are important and need to be clear.
This list is what I had all those years ago, and updated a bit...
Slashed zero, which I prefer:
Dotted zero, which is okay:
Un marked zero - sort of okay but best avoided.
Programming and console use are similar, but not quite the same as I use the console for writing emails and doing other stuff, not just programming. I wonder what fonts I'll be using in another decade...?
Debian released Debian 10.0 earlier this year. For a while I didn't bother upgrading, I was busy at work and I didn't really have the time to upgrade my growing network of systems.
Eventually I bit the bullet and started on my second oldest laptop, that I don't use much as it's a bit slow and the scratch pad doesn't work for no obvious reason (hardware fault of some kind), Other than Amarok being missing, the upgrade was painless. I then upgraded a few more systems, including my mother-in-laws laptop which had previously been running Windows 7.
All my systems are now running Debian 10 and other than a few minor glitches, it all went rather well. Overall a very dull upgrade, in that there is nothing radically different, and most things are just a little better and work in mostly the same way that I was used to. I know that there a have been some architectural changes, but at the user level it's just better - which is a good thing.
posted 19:44 ::
/unix/debian ::
permalink ::
^