Here's what O'Reilly books use: http://www.lucasfonts.com/fonts/thesansmono/about/

Ubuntu Monospace is the first free font I've seen which approaches TheSans Mono's level of quality.

They won't say how much money Dalton Maag is getting to make this really nice font without royalties, but it's assumed to be "lots and lots". Props to Shuttleworth for making free software worth professional designers' time.

Ralph Levien's Inconsolata [1] is the strongest attempt I've yet seen at reproducing the quality of TheSansMono.

[1]: http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

Actually, Consolas is extremely similar.

Lucas de Groot, who designed TheSans, also did Calibri and Consolas.

http://www.lucasfonts.com/case-studies/calibri-consolas/

Consolas isn't free (although, at $35 it's not as painful a purchase as TheSans Mono Condensed).

Letter Gothic circa 1960 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_Gothic

Nothing beats it.

For those interested Letter Gothic is available from several online type shops but be aware that since the original was released it has been reissued as both fixed and proportional variants. Additionally, it looks good out of the box on OSX but under Linux you'll want to ensure that you are running a font config like Infinality.

I own the monotype version of regular and bold, they work well, but other variants might be worth trying out. http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/singles/monotype/letter_gothic...

FTA: "We need to test the readability of the font, particular the Cyrillic and Greek which have had less testing."

Why not release the Ubuntu font-in-progress to the general public and create a "font bug tracker" where users can report their experience with the font in various characters sets across multiple devices? Ubuntu is open-source, community based software - why not open source the font design?

It's not really closed, it's more like an "open beta" that requires registration first. I signed up just out of curiosity and submitted a bug report (which was a known issue, d'oh) and it never felt "closed".

You can sign up here https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-typeface-interest after which you will be given access to the "private" https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-font-beta-testing where you can download the beta.

edit: oh, it says all that at the top of TFA.

One possible reason is that people tend not to upgrade their fonts. Therefore, old and buggy versions would remain out there, and lots of people copy fonts from their friends instead of getting them from the source.

It's a difficult problem: what's better for free software? Sticking to our principles of open development even for assets, or ensuring that potential new users see a high-quality, finished product? I don't know the answer.

They're distributing it through a PPA, so assuming that you click "Install" when update manager bugs you once a week, you should have the newest version.

It's a good question, during the previous font testing Canonical has given us access to the "font bug tracker" but the link (http://fonttest.design.canonical.com) seems to be dead at the moment. Probably oversight on their part?

With all of the Ubuntu fonts so far they've released to a limited beta group and then moved to public testing (with bug tracker). I'm not sure I agree with keeping things closed for so long, but I suspect it makes the design side much more pleasant.

"The full set are true monospace fonts, each character being exactly 0.5em wide"

Umm... a 0.5em width m?

I used to think "em" was defined as the width of the letter m (hence the name), but The Elements of Typographic Style doesn't mention that:

Type is usually measured in picas and points ... but horizontal spacing is measured in ems, and the em is a sliding measure. One em is a distance equal to the type size. In 6 point type, an em is 6 points; in 12 point it is 12 points ... Thus a one em space is proportionally the same in any size.

The book then shows a little diagram with several different sized squares.

So, as I understand it, one em is the width equal to the height of a font (which is generally, but not always, the width that the letter m is designed as). What your quote is saying, then, is all the letters fit in a box which is twice as tall as it is wide.

There was a bit of a "redefinition" when digital typesetting came along. An em used to be an M-width (and only made sense as a width measurement, as it changed drastically depending on the letterface used at a given font size). But, then, there used to more than 72 points to the inch too.

I think you're a bit confused here. It's the height of the capital M, not the width of the lowercase em, that is generally 1em.

"In olden days, an 'em' was the width of an 'M', but this is no longer true; ems are simply arbitrary units that come with a font" - the TeXbook, p60

Yeah, it's the height now, but the name derives from the width of an "m", half an em is an "en" (as in em-dash or en-dash)

The meaning of the word 'em' changes depending on where you look for its definition. Typographers are very creative with things like units and standards: even 'point' has had many different meanings.

And a 0.5em width em dash...

Mark Shuttleworth really cares about design. He is like the Steve Jobs of Linux :)

Yeah, it is a bit weird: some of the stuff from Canonical's design department is great (like scrolling indicators, getting rid of 'Quit'), and some is mediocre at best (like Unity)

Unity is awesome. I honestly find it better than OS X's desktop.

Unity is risk taking and I applaud it. Some very cool features when I played with the recent beta. Easy to pick up but has some power features as well.

Now if I could just get my brand new touchscreen to fully support it's cool gestures.

I'm really glad that somebody enjoys Unity. I gave it a try, although I don't generally use desktop environments on Unix, and I thought is was a step back from Gnome.

I found the transitions jerky and the general experience unwieldy. So I went with GNOME3, which is reasonably similar UX-wise, but "feels nicer".

It looks like "Error establishing database connection" in a proportional font to me. :P

Here's the google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...

The original worked for me, albeit slowly. If it's still slow for people, you can try the Coral CDN mirror http://design.canonical.com.nyud.net/2011/09/ubuntu-monospac...

I really like monospace (mostly) sans-serif fonts, as opposed to the Courier family, for development and terminal work. Another free addition is always welcome, although I'm not sure I like this better than my current font (DejaVu Sans Mono, I think). The raised middle stem in the 'm' looks decidedly weird to me, for example.

So the (open) sources of this font family are available in a closed format and not a single tool used by the designer is available on Ubuntu itself without resorting to convoluted solutions and (possibly) breaking a bunch of licences in the process.

What if an actual enthusiastic Ubuntu user wants to participate in the project or fork it? Well he is forced to tinker with wine or work on a Windows PC or buy a Mac.

Great.

I guess Canonical couldn't find any professional type designers who are also free software martyrs. The solution to this problem should be to improve the free tools, not to ask pros to reduce their productivity.

Very impressive! A neat trick to make small characters serif.

Nearly all nominally sans-serif mono-spaced fonts do this.

Very stupid of me that I didn't notice this. But I never noticed it until I saw the Canonical font. Maybe that's why it looks proportional?

I don't know about operating systems, but these folks at Canonical sure know how to make some pretty damn good fonts.

Whoa! Can't wait to use this.

link is dead