Software Shout-out: Anonymous

Around 2004-2005 I changed laptop computer and found that legibility on small portable screens was of increased importance compared to the 22-inch screen I had been using till then. While trying to find good fixed-width fonts for programming work I noticed a Finding the Best Programmer’s Font on Kuro5hin. This article links to the very useful Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer’s Fonts page, and from there my hunt began. The author recognises the following important qualities:

• crisp clear characters
• extended characterset
• good use of whitespace
• ‘l’, ‘1’ and ‘i’ are easily distinguished
• ‘0’, ‘o’ and ‘O’ are easily distinguished
• forward quotes from back quotes are easily distinguished – prefer mirrored appearance
• clear punctuation characters, especially braces, parenthesis and brackets

The most important for me are:

• clear differences between: l 1 i I |
• clear differences between: o O 0
• clear differences between: [] () {} <>
• clear differences between: ’ ` (though I would rather they didn’t have a mirrored appearance)

The Anonymous font by Mark Simonson fulfilled all these criteria and more. I particularly liked that the zero character is slashed in reverse, thus preventing confusion with ∅ (the empty set) and ϕ (Greek letter “phi”); in fact I liked this so much that the backslash-zero was then copied into my handwriting. I find Anonymous easy to read at all sizes (though a font rendering problem on one of the Linux platforms I used would make either the hyphen or underscore disappear at certain point sizes), and it conserves vertical space which I find especially important now that the small wide-screen form-factor has become the most common for laptops.

I use Anonymous in:

• Terminal (gnome-terminal or Apple’s Terminal application)
• Emacs (XEmacs, Emacs, Aquamacs)
• TaskPaper
• WriteRoom
• Apple Mail
• browsers (as default fixed-width font)
• …and pretty much everywhere else!