found drama

Mostly for Pete, a follow-up to a thread on Facebook today…

The co-worker’s terminal font (click to make big):

Andale Mono 9pt

Now I used to have a big fat crush on Andale Mono but how could that be easy on the eyes?  The painfully mucky tilde, the one digit and the lowercase L practically indistinguishable!  And at 9pt?  Holy cow that’s tiny.

Now Pete’s:

Monaco 10pt

A wiser choice.  The one digit and the lowercase L are more distinct (though the latter is not all that distinct from the pipe).  A nice swoosh to the tilde.  And even at 10pt, it is nice and legible.  Still, there’s something about Monaco that’s always been a little unsettling to me.  Like the legs on the lowercase M are too bunched together maybe…?  Never could put my finger on it.

Now, Consolas, that’s the fixed-width font for me:

Consolas 14pt

Now I know what you’re going to say.  “Weren’t you just busting on Andale Mono for the one digit and the lowercase L being too similar-looking?” Yes.  But there’s always that risk ¹.  I find the “1” and the “l” here to be sufficiently distinct.  Especially at that luxurious 14pt.

1. Swing too far in the opposite direction and you get a lowercase L that looks like a pipe, eh?[↩]

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