ProFont is Back

Posted on April 11, 2006
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 52 views |

Faisal Jawdat has released an OS X-compatible version of ProFont, which is hands-down the best monospace font for developing in: ProFont for OS X.

In his words:

ProFont has been around forever. It is a monospace font similar to Monaco, but with a key difference that makes it useful for programmers (and people who like or have to work in monospace fonts): O is different from 0, and 1, l, and I are all different as well. However, Cocoa does clever things with ligatures (ae, li, fi, etc.) that make this problematic.

When 10.1 came out I solved this by opening the typeface up in an OS 9 font editor and cleaning out the ligatures. I used this for myself for ages, calling it ProFontX to disambiguate. I recently ran across people complaining about this problem, so I asked the original creators of ProFont - Stephen C. Gilardi and Carl Osterwald - for approval to distribute this.

I used to use ProFont exclusively back in the pre-X days. This release makes me very happy; no more Monaco.

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