So, Visual Studio 2010 shipped. Now I have a problem: what font to use? My old standby, Dina, is a bitmap font so it doesn't work with the WPF text editor in VS2010.
Some things I look for in a programming font:
- High information density - vertical height in particular. For example, I use Dina at 8pt.
- Crisp, even lines
- Strong distinction between bold and regular (for lexical highlighting)
- Clearly unambiguous letters: l,1,0,O, and the like.
- Balanced operators - good placement for <, >, {, }, etc.
Here's Dina 8pt in VS2008:
Here's Consolas at 8pt in VS2010:
(At least, I think that's 8pt. I have zoomed the editor in and out a little with Ctrl+Mouse Wheel, but there doesn't seem to be a zoom reset...
Here's Consolas 9pt in VS2010:
Consolas is quite constrained on the horizontal. It looks horrible at 8pt, and is still slightly taller than Dina 8pt. Even at 9pt though, to my eyes, it suffers quite badly with comparison to Dina. The bold of the comment and digits is almost unnoticeable. 'M' and 'm' are very weak, probably because of the narrowness. The vertical on the 'F' of 'Func' is weak, as is the vertical on 'r'. These are in part properties of ClearType subpixel rendering, which looks slightly different from monitor to monitor and depending on configuration, but even with the configuration selected for its heaviest rendering, it looks poor on my system. Overall, the effect is washed out and slightly blurry.
Proggy Fonts are another contender. These have TTF hinted versions of what amount to bitmap fonts, so they try and sneak older rendering in through the back door. Here's Proggy Clean Slashed Zero with Bold Punctuation (Visual Studio can bold operators (and I do - and make them white, to stand out even more), but it doesn't include [], {}, () as operators, unfortunately):
This is probably the most palatable option for me, but it's still not quite as good as Dina. It's the same height, probably because Dina was based on Proggy; but the things I don't like about it most are things that Dina fixed, in particular the oddly elongated < and >, the lazy looking 's', and the "gappy" look of the bold - contrast the comment in Proggy vs Dina. Other differences incude the leg on the 'R' and the general way the capitals are slightly overly broad. Another oddity is however ClearType has interacted with its hinting, the font has ended up tinted with green.
Proggy Clean SZBP is the font I'll stick with for the moment, until I see a better option, or a better translation of Dina to TTF than this one, which is tuned for 10pt Dina, not the size I use.
