Most Modern Monospace - modified

[Chris Dean]

Without looking, I think yes. However, seizures ≠ driving, so I’m probably the least informed person to ask. I’ll start looking tomorrow though, and probably for the rest of my life now. Thanks for that.

[Maxim Zhukov]

• I’m particularly fond of monospaced fonts that have dots or slashes on the zero’s so they can't be confused with capital O’s. Without looking, how many can you name?

Without looking I can name one, Consolas.

[Birdseeding]

Er, my last link was a joke, sorry about that, I spent ages looking for a monospaced font in the "Modern" category with Didones and stuff. (Might be a space in the market there!)

Fixedsys (and I guess Excelcior) has a 0 with a clear distinction from the O, though it's done with little inside curves rather than lines or dots. Also, the 1, I, l distinction is an important one for programmers.

Here's a Swedish vanity licence plate with a non-monospaced font, so at least it's not universal:

[Té Rowan]

Right off the top of my head I can recall dotted and slashed variants of Droid Sans Mono.

http://www.leewardpro.com/articles/licplatefonts/licplate-fonts-intro.html looks to me to be a good intro/reference to licence plate typography.

Aside: Current Icelandic plates are made with what looks to me as Helvetica. As far as I can recall, the previous series was also stamped with a proportional font. In my memory, it was a DIN variant, but in RL it's not.

[Pieter van Rosmalen]

Capibara Mono:
http://www.boldmonday.com/en/capibara_overview

Pieter

[thierry blancpain]

Don't forget about all those http://www.lineto.com monospaced beautys. I'd wager they have more monospaced than proportional fonts in their library.

[gargoyle]

A few more I haven't seen mentioned...

Orator - Adobe, 1987; John Scheppler, 1962
Monaco - Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow, 1990; Susan Kare, 1983 (bitmap)
TheSans Mono - Luc(as) de Groot, 1994
TheMix Mono - Luc(as) de Groot, 1996
Thordis Sans Mono - Carlo Krüger and Günther Flake, 1997
OCRJ and OCRK - Joe Kral, 1998
Lucida Mono - Kris Holmes, 1998
Quadraat Sans Mono - Fred Smeijers, 2000
Fago Monospaced - Ole Schäfer, 2000
Eureka Mono - Peter Biľak, 2001
Fedra Mono - Peter Biľak, 2002
PTL Manual Mono - Ole Schäfer, 2002
Nexus Typewriter - Martin Majoor, 2004
Linefeed - Ray Larabie, 2005
Ascender Sans Mono - Steve Matteson, 2005
Botanika Mono - Tomáš Brousil, 2007
OliveGreen Mono - Georg Seifert, 2007

[butterick]

FB Aix has a slashed zero as an OT alternate (IIRC there's a special substitution tag for that). It's a slightly trickier problem than one might suspect — adding the slash or dot starts to make the zero look like the figure eight at small sizes.

I developed a set of alternates for Alix optimized for programming, but they didn't make it into the retail release.

[sgh]

@butterick
FB Alix looks very nice! What sort of alternates did you develop for programming? Was it just for the 0? I'm curious what you did.

Best wishes,
Stephen

[butterick]

What sort of alternates did you develop for programming?

The zero, one, and lowercase L are different. I also changed the color & alignment of a few other characters to improve their appearance at small sizes, and make them relate to each other according to their programming meaning.

Note that other than the slashed zero, these characters are NOT available in the retail version of FB Alix.

[Té Rowan]

Before I forget it yet again... Ray Larabie has made a few monospaced fonts, notably Larabiefont, Minisystems and Monofonto, all from ca. 2000. David F. Nalle made Onuava ca. 1998.

[sgh]

@butterick
AlixCode is really nice---those are thoughtful changes for programming. It's too bad that it's not currently released. Do you think that will change in the future?

Thanks for sharing!
Stephen

[butterick]

Do you think that will change in the future?

As with most things in type, it will depend on 1) sales, 2) public outcry, and 3) sales.

[typodermic]

Mitigate
PRINTF
Linefeed
Telidon
Chainprinter
Cinecav X Mono

[zonc]

Hello,

there has been a Univers Monospace version used for binary data-treatment within the 1972 Olympics.
I don't know who made it. Maybe some engineer… But it's looking quite good.

More information here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tll5Q-Rkilw

I'm just working on abook about the item
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI-uZnXRQs4

[Chris Dean]

Absolutely fantastic links. I look forward to your results.

[hrant]

> I don't know who made it.

Maybe Aicher?

hhp

[zonc]

It's possible that he has been involved but it's not mentioned anywhere. The only sure thing is the use of the font in this context. I will check the Siemens people.

Thanks for the positive response…