Webfonts are now ubiquitous across the web to the point where most of the big players even have their own typefaces and the web looks a lot better for it.

Unfortunately the problem still exists that either the browser has to wait before it draws anything while it is getting the font or it renders without the font then re-renders the page again once the font is available. Neither is a great solution and Google's PageSpeed will hit you for either so what is an enterprising web developer to do?

I started designing fonts around 1987 on an 8-bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Many years later, my involvement in the Spectrum emulation scene led aul Dunn to ask me if I could provide fonts for his excellent BASIN Sinclair BASIC for Windows. My interest in 8x8 fonts was suitably rekindled, and I ended up delivering about 60 - some even extracted from my original +3 disk images.

I wanted to get these fonts online earlier! Raw 7698-byte files, however, are only of use to BASIN users or those suitably familiar with the convoluted process and tools to get them into a Spectrum or emulator. Even trying to use them on Windows was a pain given that TrueType only cares about scalable fonts (SBIT embedded bitmaps are rare these days).

A series of posts on system fonts:

It’s been a while since I visited the bitmap fonts of old computers (see the bottom of the post for links), there are still some to evaluate!

A series of posts on system fonts:

I’ve been wanting to do a follow-up to the popular system fonts posts for some time and recent HackerNews and ArsTechnica traffic reminded me that I’m not the only one nostalgic for chunky pixel fonts of old.

One of the great things about working for Microsoft was the sheer breadth of the company means there are lots of cool and interesting things going on that you can peek into even if it’s not your area.

With a few exceptions your Microsoft badge gets you into the whole campus (some of the Xbox studios and the executive floor are exceptions).

People are always surprised when they hear you’re interested in typography. The appreciation and interest in the shape of letters and symbols is definitely a little more unusual to find as a hobby but it’s actually quite fun!

Here’s a few ideas I hopehope will prove my point.

Google have switched system font for Android’s latest release (known as Ice Cream Sandwich) from the Droid Family to a new typeface known as Roboto.

Typographica opened today with a critique of the Roboto font which boils down to this:

A series of posts on system fonts:

With the 8-bit system fonts post being so popular I just had to jump right in and look at the system fonts available on the 16-bit machines!

A series of posts on system fonts:

My love of typography originated in the 80’s with the golden years of 8-bit home computing and their 8×8 pixel monospaced fonts on low-resolution displays.

Taking my bitmap font Envy Code B into the vector TrueType Envy Code R was a long process, the most difficult being hinting.

Bitmap fonts are incredibly easy to make. Using a program like Softy or BitFonter you decide the size of your letters and start plotting pixels. You can see exactly how it will look because you draw every glyph (letter/symbol/number) in every size you want to support. This can obviously be very time consuming and doesn’t let you take full advantage of the resolution of the device and the capabilities it offers. A printer can handle in excess of 300 dpi while a display is typically 72 dpi (Mac) or 96 dpi (Windows) with LCD’s supporting sub-pixels due to the individual layout of the red-green and blue elements you can’t feasibly pre-plot every single combination and even if you could the file size would be rather large.

Computing history tells us of a mythical place where many of the innovations we take for granted today were either invented or refined to a working level at a single location known as the Xerox’s Palo-Alto Research Center (PARC).

These discoveries form the basis of much of the technology we use today and include the desktop metaphor, the graphical user interface, laser printers, object orientation and Ethernet.

It’s been a struggle but finally after countless hours here it is, the next release of my Envy Code R monospaced (fixed-width) font designed for programmers.

Many glyphs have been redrawn since preview 6 including braces, lower-case yy, 66 & 99, ampersand, dollar-sign, hash etc. One pixel was removed vertically height to make the box drawing balanced and allow more lines per screen.

I am now settled into my new, albeit temporary, apartment here in Vancouver, BC working for Microsoft!

For those who haven’t been following my blog long I took a job at Microsoft Canada Development Center as a developer on LINQ to SQL. It turns out my H-1B Visa has been approved and I will be moving down to Redmond in October.

Work on my Envy Code R programming font has resumed and I’ve spent hours playing with the hinting process to ensure it looks good at sizes above and below 10 point:

I know, I said there would be a good chance that the next version of Envy Code R would be out this weekend but the annoying sizing, thickness and cropping issues that came up at some sizes above and below the optimum 10 point were really annoying me.

Many articles later, some playing around with Microsoft Visual TrueType and much frustration and experimentation later I think I’m on the right path.

The next version of my Envy Code R font especially designed for programming (monospaced, easily distinguishable characters) is nearing completion and represents a very response-driven update to feedback, specifically:

I have also fleshed out a number of additional symbols and accented letters that has seen the number of code pages supported increase to 12 pages and made a large number of tweaks to the italic version which was a last-minute addition to 0.6 (PR6) and had a number of errors especially round the accented letters.

Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine.

One thing not too many people have yet been raving over is the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender Fonts known as the Droid family.

Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine which includes the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender known as the Droid family.

Check out previous coverage of the well-known and lesser-known coding fonts.

Every month FontShop make a font available for free for a limited time so grab it while you can. The best option is to join their monthly newsletter so you don’t miss one!

Ralph is behind the excellent Inconsolata font which is great for printing code or if you like large programming fonts. He also has a number of classical typefaces including the great ATF Century Catalogue, Museum Caps, LeBe, ATF Bodoni and ATF Franklin Gothic.

Some of my older bitmap “pixel” font files are now available again, they are:

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.

Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood published a nice round-up of coding fonts he’s been looking at lately in Visual Studio with his own color 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.

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.

Envy Code R has been updated since this post.

I have been experimenting with Envy Code R over the last few months – everything from creating a bold version to delta hinting with Visual TrueType with mixed results.

Jeff Atwood asked What’s Wrong With Apple’s Font Rendering? and as I answered in the comments it comes down to philosophy:

The primary difference is that Microsoft try to align everything to whole pixels vertically and sub-pixels horizontally.

Linux vendor Red Hat have released a font family named Liberation under a GPL license.

The family consists of three typefaces known as Liberation Serif, Liberation Sans and Liberation Mono each in normal, italic, bold and bold italic variants. The fonts are not hinted in this initial release so may not look too great on-screen at some sizes. Red Hat expect to release better-looking hinted versions in the future. Having attempted hinting Envy Code R font myself they have my sympathy.

Vista and Office 2007 are interesting as they provide major user interface work that also includes new sets of fonts. I thought it would be interesting to show the evolution of the various styles.

Times New Roman has been the default typeface in Microsoft Word since version 1 and was originally designed for printing newspapers on high speed printing machines whilst still retaining legibility.

If you’re tired of the ugly-as-sin Courier New and have tried the popular well-known scalable TrueType/OpenType mono-spaced/fixed-width replacements:

And you’re still not feeling it then why not give these potentials a quick spin.

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:

Envy Code R has been updated since this post.

I’ve been back less than 36 hours but have managed to spend a little more time working on Envy Code R.

Envy Code R has been updated since this post.

My last post got me thinking – if I’m so happy with Envy Code B bar it’s ability to scale or take advantage of ClearType then there is only one real option. I reached for the pixelated TrueType conversion of Envy Code B and five hours later had a rough version of my first ever vector fontfirst ever vector font – Envy Code R.

The blogging about favorite programming fonts doesn’t seem to want to truly die down so here’s how I rate the most popular fonts for programming in descending order with my own Envy Code B which I use all the time – but now desperately needs the ClearType treatment.

If you click the image you’ll see red boxes highlighting what I feel are the various problem characters/positioning with each font.

Inconsolata now incorporates slashed zero’s rendering my version redundant. It has therefore been removed.

I’ve been messing about with FontForge and the Inconsolata font and come up with my own variant – InconsolataDG.

My quest for something to replace Envy Code B on my ClearType-enabled systems continues.

It must be obviously scalable, mono-spaced (yes I know you cancan program with variable-width but I prefer fixed-width), have distinctive characters to help avoid confusion between 1il, o0OQ, $Ss8 at reasonably small font sizes – you know the drill.

It’s been a long time coming but finally – a TrueType conversion of my programming font Envy Code B.

It’s still a pixelated font so will only look good at 10pt (on Windows, 13pt on the Mac). There is no bold or italic variants but this should be enough to get it into those elusive TTF-only applications like CodeSmith and Flash.

My conversion of the Palm OS system font – as seen on the Palm Pilot – is now available for download. I’ve re-created the original 7 point normal font, the 7 point bold and the 11 point larger text from Palm OS screen-shots.

If you need a really small proportional font that’s nice to read this could be what you’re looking for.

This month has seen my Envy Code A and Envy Code B fonts stumbled upon some 4,000 times thanks to a Digg to Keith Deven’s programming fonts page that links here.

I’ve taken this opportunity to update the fonts – Envy Code B had a couple of issues with mis-positioned characters in the 9pt version especially with “il#” characters in the bold one. Fixed.

Back in the days of Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and Mac OS 7 the operating systems used a bit mapped font as the default system font for the various windows and dialogs.

Apple replaced their venerable Chicago with a scalable version that took advantage of font smoothing and moved on. By Mac OS X they switched to entirely new fonts such as Lucida Grande.