Adobe's Source Code Pro Font

Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by artursapek on Sunday October 07, 2012 @12:53PM (#4623688)

I've never understood why people code on dark backgrounds with such thick, fuzzy fonts. I find it extremely hard to read and have instead grown used to coding on an off-white background. Fonts are just rendered much thinner in a dark color on a light background (or at least, they seem to be). There's more space between legs and inside the o's in the letters. I find it much easier to read.

I've spent many hours trying to figure out how to convince Vim and/or OS X to lighten up on their font rendering. For some reason the only place I've been able to pull this off is Drracket which I just use for a class, and which has an option to do it. I've never been able to pull it off in my standard coding environment. I can't understand why that option isn't available anywhere else, or on an operating system level.

This is Monaco 12pt in Drracket and Vim, with that Drracket font smoothing option at the bottom: http://i.imgur.com/Va0ZN.png

Is there a good reason there's such little control over font rendering, at least on Mac?

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Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by tuxracer on Sunday October 07, 2012 @07:55PM (#4624856)

OSX font rendering is optimized for high ppi displays (128+ ppi). If you try to look at screenshots of OSX font rendering on low-ppi displays (i.e. typical Windows laptop with 15" display at 1366 x 768) it's going to look incredibly fuzzy.

On the other hand, ClearType is optimized for low-ppi displays. If you try to view text rendered with ClearType on a high ppi display (128+ ppi) it will look incredibly thin because ClearType attempts to force straight font lines into a single row or column of pixels which is incredibly thin at such a high ppi. That's the very thing that makes ClearType fonts look much crisper on very low ppi displays.

tl;dr OSX font rendering is much more readable on 128+ (or even 220) ppi displays.

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Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by cochese on Monday October 08, 2012 @05:39AM (#4626124)

Is this true? Not even the Thunderbolt Display is 128+

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Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by mitsche on Monday October 08, 2012 @07:32AM (#4626359)

I think this comes down to personal preference. I am on a 24 inch screen with 1080 lines and I still prefer reading text in OS X to Windows on it. On my shabby laptop, not so much.

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Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by xentronium on Sunday October 07, 2012 @06:43PM (#4624686)

> why people code on dark backgrounds

I do it mostly because staring at white background all day burns into my retinas.

> I've spent many hours trying to figure out how to convince Vim and/or OS X to lighten up on their font rendering

There was a system-wide anti-aliasing strength setting for OS X.

    defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

I believe it's 0 to 3 but I can't check right now.

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Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by miohtama on Sunday October 07, 2012 @01:13PM (#4623744)

You are correct. The Source Code Pro light variant looks less fuzzy than Source Code Pro (normal). OSX does very fuzzy fonts by default. I updated the blog post to reflect that you should consider the light variant first on OSX.

Also when switching to the retina display the fuzziness goes 100% away.

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Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by artursapek on Sunday October 07, 2012 @01:43PM (#4623830)

Cool, thanks. Wasn't aware of the light variant.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to my first retina laptop.

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Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by mgcross on Monday October 08, 2012 @02:20AM (#4625715)

I find off-white a little easier to read, but the sheer amount of light emanating from a large screen anywhere near white irritates my eyes more so than the strain of reading slightly fuzzy fonts.

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Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by saurik on Sunday October 07, 2012 @01:10PM (#4623733)

"Please note that Source Code Pro comes with varying lightness degrees (I think there was 5 of them)." <- From the comments on this article; might be useful.

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Re:Adobe's Source Code Pro Font by dmorgan on Sunday October 07, 2012 @02:50PM (#4624002)

>I've never understood why people code on dark backgrounds with such thick, fuzzy fonts. I find it extremely hard to read and have instead grown used to coding on an off-white background.

Because we (I) find them extremely easy to read. I can't stand white or off-white backgrounds.

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