Archive for Coding-fonts tag
Recent activities and inactivities
It has been a crazy couple of months between moving home, spending a week in Seattle and a couple of days in Holland for my real day job (the source of income!)
It was a little too close to my USA trip which has meant I’ve missed my niece trick-or-treating for the first time since I returned to Guernsey 3 years ago which leaves me a little sad. I guess I should be grateful for not being hit with jet-lag and the fact I’m surviving just fine on 5.5 hours of sleep a day which tonight is in a cubicle hotel…
As you can imagine the fun projects I get involved with in my own time have suffered somewhat although I’ve really tried to at least keep the blog posts flowing. Here’s a quick update on things:
SubSonic
I’ve committed the final piece of my refactoring to make the coding languages abstracted. To add additional programming language support you can now just implement the ICodeLanguage interface and add knowledge of it to the CodeLanguageFactory class. The command line and web interface tools will all just magically work with a recompilation.
Rob Conery is now under the employ of Microsoft and will be aligning SubSonic with their MVC efforts. I hope this support of open-source projects is a trend Microsoft are keen to continue.
AnkhSVN
This great add-in for Visual Studio provides Subversion integration continues to face competition from the commercial VisualSVN front and I had an interesting discussion with Aaron Jensen about performance with large projects and some relating to moving.
I have some UI work checked-in to trunk and we are likely to move to a better model for integrating with the Solution Explorer to address these issues that would require we drop Visual Studio 2003 support which is looking quite likely. Various things are moving forward on this project so keep an eye on it!
Envy Code R
I’ve not touched Envy Code R since the PR6.1 release but to be honest this tends to be the way I work with it. Nothing for weeks then 15 hours over a weekend gets it to the next release. Unlike code I find it difficult to jump in and out whilst being productive and consistent. Perhaps when I’ve worked on a bunch I’ll be able to but this is still my first scalable font.
The plan is to add all the essential box-drawing characters for code page 850, extend the # sign (should we slant this in the non-italic version?), increase the curves on { and } and adjust the comma to make it less like a slightly deformed dot. I’m open to suggestions as to whether the .,;: characters should in fact revert back to be square dots rather than round ones… again, leave comments if you have an opinion. I’m not sure whether I would extend this squaring back to the dots on ij! etc.
I’m hoping to get preview 7 out within the next couple of weeks and if that goes well then consider a more liberal licence to allow bundling etc. as I’ve had a couple of enquiries.
Silk Companion icons #1
My pack of addition Silk style icons has suffered as I find it impossible to draw on the move requiring instead a comfortable desk and a proper mouse to draw. As I no longer have a desk at home this means staying late in the office or throwing my lunchtimes at them.
The temptation is to just release the 352 icons as they currently are and produce another set at a later date. The alternative would mean a release some times over the next 1-3 weeks when the number finally reaches the proposed 500 mark.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions, leave a comment!
[)amien
Older pixel fonts back online
Some of my older bitmap “pixel” font files are now available again, they are:
- Envy Code A – sizes from 7pt-12pt in both regular and bold weights
- Envy Code B – sizes from 9pt-10pt in regular, bold, italic and bold italic. (was the basis for Envy Code R)
- PalmOS – a Window port of the PalmOS system font recreated from screenshots.
I also have about 20 pixel fonts from my Spectrum days that I am intending on bringing across to Windows FON format in the near future.
[)amien
Envy Code R Jeff Atwood scheme
Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood published a nice round-up of coding fonts he’s been looking at lately in Visual Studio with his own colour scheme.
For reasons best known to Jeff he went with 11 point this time (previously his scheme was published with 10 point) and used the older preview of Envy Code R neglecting to mention the italic-as-bold variant to get round the no-italics limitation of Visual Studio’s highlighting syntax editor.
So here is the latest version, at the optimal 10 point utilising the italic variant and Jeff’s own colour scheme modified to show comments in ‘bold’:
Personally I am using a tweaked version of Thomas Restrepo’s dark theme at work that currently looks like:
[)amien
Envy Code R preview #6 released with Visual Studio italics
A newer version of Envy Code R is available.
The last few days have been frantic ones putting the final touches to the next release of the Envy Code R typeface as I bring it closer to my idea of the perfect coding font.
Many glyphs have been redrawn, curves improved and a many additional characters and symbols added bringing the number of glyphs to 461 – enough to cover common European and US code pages including Windows/ISO 1250 & 1252 as well as MacOS Roman and a few others.
There was some interest in a bold variant and so once that was done I felt the urge to make an italic one too:
Phew!
As a bonus I’ve created a variant that overcomes Visual Studio’s aversion to italics by marking the italic font as bold. Choose ‘Envy Code R VS’ in the Font and Colors part of Visual Studio’s Options and choose bold wherever you want italics.
Here’s a sample at 10 point/ClearType with my own color scheme:
Yummy.
A few things to note:
- The new glyphs for accented characters, ligatures etc. might not be correct, they’re new to me
- Bitmaps are missing so if you don’t use smoothing/anti-aliasing/ClearType stick to the prior PR4 release
- Optimal size: Windows 10 point, Java 13 point and Mac OS X 12.5 point but looks good at larger sizes too
- Some glyphs will be improved (96?&) but others can’t (WwMm@) as there are no more pixels to play with
- At some sizes individual letters aren’t the right height, e.g. u,v,x at 12 point (damn hinting)
Download of this older version no longer available.
Feel free to leave comments and suggestions here (or better yet blog about it!)
[)amien