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fonts.png You are what font you use

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The object of this tutorial is provide deep but succinct commentary (without marketing generalizations) as we take a carefully crafted step-by-step hands-on tour. All on a single searcheable page. NOTE: Content here are my personal opinions, and not intended to represent any employer (past or present). “PROTIP:” here highlight information I haven’t seen elsewhere on the internet because it is hard-won, little-know but significant facts based on my personal research and experience.

Overview

Font files

For code editors on your desktop, you’re usually fine with either OTF (Open Type Format) or TTF (TrueType) fonts.

Fonts usually come with a license attached.

A font family usually shares the same design philosophy, making rendering in bold or italics visually cohesive and organized.

Monospace fonts popular among coders because they make the amount of whitespace clear, and improves alignment and readability. That reduces wasting time on bugs.

Monospace fonts is often designed with a slash or a dot through the number zero character also used in Scandanavian/Nordic languages.

Linux Fonts folder

On Kali and other Debian distributions, Truetype fonts are installed in folder /usr/share/fonts/truetype - so copy .ttf font files there.

Easy install via Homebrew Fonts

The easiest way to install free fonts is to use Homebrew Caskroom.

  1. First, do this command one time to configure:

    brew tap caskroom/fonts

    The response at time of writing:

    ==> Tapping caskroom/fonts
Cloning into '/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/caskroom/homebrew-fonts'...
remote: Counting objects: 1140, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (677/677), done.
remote: Total 1140 (delta 769), reused 527 (delta 459), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (1140/1140), 210.54 KiB | 795.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (769/769), done.
Tapped 0 formulae (1,156 files, 945.1KB)

  2. See the list of fonts at:

    https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask

  3. For each font you want installed. The most popular are:

    brew install –cask font-open-sans

    PROTIP: This draws from font-open-sans.rb at https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-fonts/blob/master/Casks/font-open-sans.rb

    Note in the response that all the variants are installed:

    ==> Satisfying dependencies
==> Checking out https://github.com/google/fonts/trunk/apache/opensans
==> No checksum defined for Cask font-open-sans, skipping verification
==> Installing Cask font-open-sans
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-Bold.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Fonts/OpenSans-
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-BoldItalic.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Fonts/Ope
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-ExtraBold.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Fonts/Open
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-ExtraBoldItalic.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Font
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-Italic.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Fonts/OpenSan
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-Light.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Fonts/OpenSans
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-LightItalic.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Fonts/Op
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-Regular.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Fonts/OpenSa
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-Semibold.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Fonts/OpenS
==> Moving Font 'OpenSans-SemiboldItalic.ttf' to '/Users/wilsonmar/Library/Fonts
🍺  font-open-sans was successfully installed!

According to a research study done by Hongkiat, the top 10 free and paid fonts mentioned by web and graphic designers were:

View fonts you have on Mac

Use Apple’s Font Book app:

  1. In Finder, choose Go > Applications. Scroll to Font Book and double-click to open it.

    ( open "/Applications/Font Book.app" doesn’t work )

    This program is described at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201749

  2. Click “User”.

  3. In Finder, drag the new font folder and drop it under the list of user fonts.

  4. Delete the font folder and zip file.

  5. PROTIP: Save fonts you download (rather than using Homebrew) so you can add them again on other machines.

Cross-platform Fonts

Open Sans on both Mac and Windows enable similar display.

The Light font is minimalistic.

Corporate Fonts

Many large enterprises prefer to use their own fonts as part of their “branding”.

See:

Elegant

For menus, invitations,

For invitations to baby showers:

Bitmap vs vector

There are two ways fonts are drawn - as bitmaps as static dots in a bitmap file or as vectors drawn dynamically by a program.

Vector fonts look better on Apple monitors (with 1080p HD and above) because they allow more efficient scaling.

When using old monitors with lower resolution below 720p, bitmap fonts are better because they are generally more legible at smaller sizes on low-resolution screens.

Mono-spaced Programming Fonts

I am not satisfied with standard fonts to display programming code.

Characters should be clear, easy to read, in cases of clashing ones such as 1, l, i or O, o, 0 easily distinguishable, differences between different kinds of brackets, quotes and parentheses should be clear, punctuation should be emphasized and they shouldn’t break up words or sentences due to uneven character widths.

My main criteria is a narrow font so more characters fit on a line.

Vera Mono

Vera Mono is the standard monospaced font in Fedora Linux.

Todd McLeod’s Favorite IDE Font video with install on Gogland.

From goo.gl/m51nNx for bitstream_vera_mono.zip

Nunito

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/nunito

Fira

https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

Operator

For $99 per year for up to 250,000 page views per month,
https://www.typography.com/cloud/welcome/
is delivered via Akamai to provide each browser with exactly the right type of webfonts it needs.

For $299 just to use it on web pages or
For $599 to use on a single computer,
H&Co’s Operator font is the new status symbol for developers, like having a Tesla.

Mono ScreenSmart render down to 9 pixels.

See the video about fixed width font design at
https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator

Meslo LG Multi-Platform

Now one would think that Apple engineers are rather particular about fonts.

Since Snow Leopard, Menlo-Regular is the default font for Apple’s developer tools and the Terminal. (which is a customized Bitstream Vera Sans Mono).

But no.

One guy has nitpicky gripes with it:

So he created a customized version of Apple’s font.

https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font

His website has a “DZ” edition with dots inside zeros so no one can confuse them for upper case letter O.

https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font/blob/master/dist/v1.2.1/Meslo%20LG%20v1.2.1.zip

Thanks to his work, we now have a good fixed-sized font that works across Mac and Windows.

https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font/wiki/Using-Meslo-LG-with-the-Windows-Console

GoLang fonts

The font family, called Go, includes proportional- and fixed-width faces in normal, bold, and italic renderings.

https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts

Fira Code

Shell Prompt Font: Fira Code at https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew install --cask font-fira-code

The response at time of writing:

==> Downloading https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/releases/download/5/Fira_Code
==> Downloading from https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Verifying SHA-256 checksum for Cask 'font-fira-code'.
==> Installing Cask font-fira-code
==> Moving Font 'FiraCode-Bold.ttf' to '/Users/wilson_mar/Library/Fonts/FiraCode
==> Moving Font 'FiraCode-Light.ttf' to '/Users/wilson_mar/Library/Fonts/FiraCod
==> Moving Font 'FiraCode-Medium.ttf' to '/Users/wilson_mar/Library/Fonts/FiraCo
==> Moving Font 'FiraCode-Regular.ttf' to '/Users/wilson_mar/Library/Fonts/FiraC
==> Moving Font 'FiraCode-Retina.ttf' to '/Users/wilson_mar/Library/Fonts/FiraCo
==> Moving Font 'FiraCode-SemiBold.ttf' to '/Users/wilson_mar/Library/Fonts/Fira
🍺  font-fira-code was successfully installed!

Hack Fonts from GitHub

There are two to try:

https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font

https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Hack

  1. Scroll down to click “Latest version”, which for me was:

    https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Hack/releases/download/v2.020/Hack-v2_020-ttf.zip

  2. Unzip file: Hack-v2_020-ttf.zip to Hack-v2_020-ttf

  3. In Finder navigate to your user’s Library folder.

  4. Drag and drop the unzipped fonts

Dylexia Fonts

Verdana is not only a casual, fun-looking font, but one that makes it easier to read for those with mild Dylexia. Dyslexia is one of the most prevalent learning disabilities, affecting the lives of around 15-20% of the world’s population.

Dyslexia-friendly fonts typically feature:

https://reciteme.com/us/news/dyslexia-friendly-fonts/

Anti-OCR fonts

For when you don’t want your text to be recognized by Tesseract or other Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning software.

pdf ocrx extract text from PDF files.

VIDEO: ZXX fonts by Sang Mun, former NSA contractor, has 6 styles:

Comic font to use in meme cartoons

Words in this cartoon meme, from World’s Finest Comics #153 (1965), is changed to create various memes:

fonts-comic-bat-slap-320x314-61000

It doesn’t look right if one of the standard fonts for word processing are used on comics such as this.

It’s more appropriate to use Neale Davidson’s Comic Book font is at https://www.dafont.com/comic-book.font

Instead of using a scan, which looks pixelated, Miles Goodhew at http://blog.m0les.com/2012/12/bat-slap-retro-vectored.html vectorized it into an SVG file using the Inkscape open-source drawing program.

Transparent Font

VIDEO: Within Google Slides, a workaround to create transparent font is to use font “Zilla Slab Highlight”

More on OSX

This is one of a series on Mac OSX: