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:

My Humane theme for Visual Studio is getting a fair bit of traffic today courtesy of Scott Hanselman. Given I have been messing with Mac development lately I thought it was worth porting to TextMate and Xcode 3.

My Envy Code R programming font isn’t great on the Mac yet so I have configured these to use the excellent but overlooked Panic Sans in 12 point which unlike Monaco is available in bold, italic and bold italic variants. (I love my comments to be italics)

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.

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…

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.

I came across a posting by Thomas Restrepo about a theme for Vim he likes called Wombat and how it wouldn’t be worth porting to Visual Studio as it doesn’t support italic syntax highlighting — as we all know.

This got me thinking and I was able to port it with italicswith italics although the process is a bit of a hack.

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.

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.

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.