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 y, 6 & 9, ampersand, dollar-sign, hash etc. One pixel was removed vertically height to make the box drawing balanced and allow more lines per screen.

These new box-drawing, shading and symbols make Envy Code R a great font for the command-prompt (Consolas and Lucida Console lack box-drawing completely). To use them you will need to run the included registry file and reboot to operate correctly from a command prompt's properties dialog.

This typeface contains over 550 glyphs providing full complements for DOS, Windows and Mac versions of the US, Western, Central Europe, Turkish, Baltic, Icelandic and Nordic code-pages. This hits several Unicode ranges including Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended A & B, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Letterlike Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows... although not all of these ranges are complete yet.

As well as regular and bold variants this version includes a full italic version too and the obligatory italic-as-bold hack to get italic syntax highlighting in Visual Studio as shown here in my favourite 10 point with my Humane theme.

And for those of you that like the font a little larger it now looks good and the odd sizing issues are all gone!

Okay, enough with the teasing, you've waited far too long...

Download Envy Code R Preview #7.2 (TrueType) (178 KB)

How does Envy Code R look with your favourite scheme and IDE?

Show the world with a screenshot on your blog (linking here, thanks!)

[)amien

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.

Of course what you really want to know is how the new version looks in Visual Studio with that lovely Humane theme of mine:

There is still some work to do on the sizes above and below 10 point (again) as well as fleshing out a few more symbols, letters and italicising additional letters such as a curly k and rounder e which I hope will be finished towards the end of this week.

The observant followers may have noticed a pixel has been shaved off the vertical height which now brings it in line with the bitmapped Envy Code B coding font. I had intended on making the change for some time and the box characters practically demanded it to ensure the centres were whole pixels and not off-centre but some people may not like it...

A newer version of Envy Code R is available.

[)amien

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 Fonts known as the Droid family.

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

There are a number of Droid fonts including Droid Sans and Droid Serif but of particular interest for developers is the Droid Sans Mono font that looks great in Visual Studio not only at my favourite 10 point... but from 7 point upwards with either ClearType or standard font smoothing although some might find the fact it smooths at all sizes a little soft (or Mac-like).

Here it is at 9 point with Rob Conery's Vibrant Ink 2 theme:

Here it is at 11 point with my Humane theme:

And hereis 12 point in Xcode on the Mac:

The only issues are:

Being that the Droid family is Apache licensed no doubt somebody will fill that gap (okay, okay, I'll give it a shot when I get some time;-)

Download Droid Sans Mono (TrueType TTF) (47 KB)

Try my free scalable coding font Envy Code R (shown below) with Visual Studio italic support, has a bold variant and distinguishable pairs 0O etc:

[)amien