Your Favorite Fonts?

[oz]

Most of the time, I run fairly ordinary fonts such as dejavu sans for general applications, dejavu mono for text editors, and terminus or tamsyn for xterminals and virtual consoles.

What fonts are the rest of you using on your Linux boxes these days?

[rokytnji]

serif mostly. Never got into fonts that much OZ.

[oz]

Yeah, I don't experiment with many different fonts myself, but do keep an eye open in case something interesting should happen along. The main criteria for me is it that it must be easy to read, rather than pretty or fancy. I've been testing some fonts mostly for terminals and status bars recently and it always seems like those fonts that I find are a bit too big, or a bit too small. Conky, for instance, acts very differently at times depending on the font used.

In some cases, it seems like there is a huge leap in size when you go from size 12 to 14, and there is no size 13 available. Some of the ttf fonts out there have weird things about them too, such as certain parts of certain letters have a faded look more so than others, so I avoid those. The ms-core fonts that so many are fond of don't work well at all for me, so they never get installed.

[elija]

The only real preference I have is the Liberation Mono font for coding and I do like Verdana on a web page as it is very clear and easy to read on a screen.

[oz]

The only real preference I have is the Liberation Mono font for coding and I do like Verdana on a web page as it is very clear and easy to read on a screen.

Verdana is a nice font indeed. One of those MS-core fonts (pretty sure it wasn't Verdana), has the issue of certain parts of certain letters looking faded. If I remember correctly the letter k was one of them, and there were a number of other letters that do the same. It seems like it might have been Arial. Having that on every machine I installed them on, I dropped the core fonts and never looked back. I might try them again sometime and see if things have changed any.

As for coding fonts, I like those with characters that are easily distinguishable such as slashed 0's but with some fonts even those can look like a number 8 once your eyes start becoming tired.

[hazel]

I must admit that I have never been able to see the difference between fonts. I can see if a font is serif or sans-serif but that's about all. So I have no preferences, except for size, and accept whatever an application uses.

[oz]

The following page has some good examples of various coding fonts and some things to look for when examining fonts for programming purposes:

Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer's Fonts

When you look at the "View Sample" pages for each font, you can begin to see things that make reading certain fonts easier than others, especially after looking at a computer screen for many hours. Of course some of those ideas can be carried over to non-programming fonts for those that are on computers for many hours every day.

When you take a very close look at different fonts and their individual characters, there is a certain amount of artistry involved, and you can begin to appreciate how much work the creators have put into them.

[Alpha90]

I am kind of lazy when it comes to learning fonts so I kept my key to windows 7 so i could use all of the fonts windows has.

[oz]

When I first started using Linux, the fonts seemed horrible, and I was always wishing they looked as good as Microsoft's fonts, but about 7 or 8 years ago, I started liking Linux fonts better and haven't installed any Microsoft fonts since.

That said, I installed and fired up Gnome 3 right after it was released, and the first thing I did was to install a different font because their new default font didn't suit me at all. Can't even remember the name of that font now, but I ended up dumping Gnome 3 altogether just a few weeks ago because it has become too slow and clunky.