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 Envy Code R Preview #6.1 (TrueType) (124KB)

Feel free to leave comments and suggestions here (or better yet blog about it!)

[)amien

Envy Code R has been updated since this post.

Here is the Envy Code R programming font I've been working on as it currently stands:

As you can see it looks great at 10pt regardless of what smoothing (or not) you are using. Whilst you can use it at other sizes and it will scale without turning into big pixels there are plenty of other fonts around that will look better at larger sizes/in print.

It is missing a number of foreign symbols and characters, there is no width-preserving bold version to accompany it just yet and there are still issues with the full-widths of @©® symbols as the Windows ClearType renderer insists on squashing them rather than let them potentially touch another character.

I will attempt to address these as best I can as time goes by as well as trying to shave a pixel off the vertical height. It also doesn't look too great on the Mac but if you want to try anyway use 13pt and be prepared to set the height in terminal to just above 1.0 to stop the letters being cut-off.

Comments are welcome but please bear in mind that Envy Code R is designed to look very close to Envy Code B so deviating from that further is unlikely right now.

Finally please bear in mind that whilst Envy Code R is free-for-use it is copyrighted and as such it must not be redistributed, bundled or modified without permission at this time. Once all the issues are addressed I'll likely release the whole thing under a free/open licence.

This is simply because I do not wish people looking for this font in the future to be downloading older preview versions.

Download Envy Code R preview #4 (20KB)

If you were wondering what it does look like large:

Update

I have updated the preview font to fix vertical problems on the capital E as well as add a bunch of symbols not yet done (e.g. fractions) and also stuck in a bit-mapped 9pt version for those not using smoothing.

[)amien