A few weeks ago, I presented an article entitled Top 10 Programming Fonts. The article received many great comments, including a handful of suggestions for fonts that didn’t make it into the list.
One glaring omission, suggested by a number of readers, was Anonymous, a TrueType version of Anonymous 9 created by the incredibly talented Mark Simonson. I’ve been a fan of Mark’s work since I started reading his blog sometime back in 2004. Mark is a master craftsman, and his attention to detail is obvious just by looking at the many typefaces he’s designed.
As much as I liked Anonymous, there were a few minor issues — like its one-story “a” (which looked a little bit like an “o”) and its large size compared to other monospace fonts — that prevented me from including it in the list.
Enter Anonymous Pro
A few days after I posted the list, I contacted Mark to chat about Anonymous, and that’s when he shared some news: he was about to release a free update to Anonymous called Anonymous Pro. Anonymous Pro would address all of the issues I had with Anonymous while providing a handful of additional improvements and enhancements, like adjusted relevant point size, a slashed-zero that goes the “right way”, a unicode-based character set, and more.
Mark sent me a pre-release version of Anonymous Pro to experiment with. It immediately became my monospace typeface of choice anytime I’m looking for a monospace font with style, and I’ve been using it everywhere ever since.
It’s fantastic. Just take a look at it (Figure 1, below).
Figure 1 Anonymous Pro
I tend to use a larger font when I write code. Figure 2 shows a real-life screenshot of some MacRuby code.
Figure 2 Anonymous Pro makes MacRuby look even better
Anonymous Pro even looks good in very small sizes as well, reminiscent of the excellent fonts I’ve seen used in handheld video games (like Advance Wars 2), detailed in Figure 3, below. Also included are bitmapped versions of the font at 10, 11, 12, and 13 pixels.
Figure 3 Anonymous Pro at 10pt.
If you’re looking for a monospace typeface with a bit of personality, check out Anonymous Pro.
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cheapRoc
12 June 2009 at 1:39 pm
If you are into Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Consolas also adds some nice style to the same sort of type feel. I use it for Emacs in Terminal, straight bold.
Ryan Gonzalez
12 June 2009 at 1:40 pm
I don’t know about Anonymous Pro — it seems to be a little too wide. Its serifs also seems to be too complex (especially when bold), causing them to look muddy. Also, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that there’s a horizontal stretch going on. Anyway, I think I’ll stick to Inconsolatas as my coding font of choice.
Jason G
12 June 2009 at 1:53 pm
Your screen shot makes it look much nicer than it does on my Windows PC at work. I thought it was terrible and switched right back to Consolas. At 10pt the characters were inconsistent height and at any size the angle brackets were just awful.
Here is a comparison shot I made: http://twitpic.com/74blc
DZ
12 June 2009 at 3:06 pm
Nice, but that pound (#) really bothers me.
Mingo Hagen
12 June 2009 at 3:16 pm
I’m not a fan of the difference in thickness of the stroke of the H and the T’s in HTTP. In other news I heard that Monaco is being phased out? Have you heard anything about this: http://twitter.com/damienguard/status/2130457075
Tim Lahey
12 June 2009 at 4:23 pm
When I tried it in TextMate, the red underline for spelling “errors” goes right through the text instead of under which is less than ideal. Even still I prefer DejaVu Sans Mono.
I’m curious to try Menlo when Snow Leopard is released.
Joe Clark
12 June 2009 at 5:23 pm
I would say this is more reminiscent of typefaces used by pen plotters circa 1987, or of “Latin” typefaces used in ill-typeset Japanese and Chinese. t is highly problematic even thought it really presents no problem in monospaced type. Various confusable characters, including 6 and 9, are still confusable. w and m are nicely differentiated. Kind of a Knuth-calibre effort, really.
Oddly, the bold weight works better as an actually cohesive typeface. This is not uncommon with monospaced fonts.
Scott Hulbert
12 June 2009 at 9:24 pm
@Tim Lahey:
Usage note from the creator here says that there is a bug in TextMate that should be fixed soon: http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html
Darcy Murphy
13 June 2009 at 2:26 am
I’ve been using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono ever since I found it on LInux a few years back. Before that, I strictly used Courier New in my Windows days. This looks like a good mix of the two fonts, and I look forward to trying it out.
Thanks for the tip.
Ep
13 June 2009 at 4:18 am
Which is it… personality or style?
Geoff
13 June 2009 at 4:48 am
Panic Sans/Espresso Mono/DejaVu in TextMate on a dark background for me, thanks.
Christina Warren
15 June 2009 at 4:19 pm
That’s total, total hotness. I did this whole extensive list of the best monospaced fonts (free and paid) last summer that never ended up getting published, I should probably put it up. Anonymous is a great font and the pro version looks fantastic.
Can’t wait for the new face in Snow Leopard.
Sam Kelly
15 June 2009 at 5:55 pm
@Jason G, I can confirm that it does look awful on Windows with ClearType, but the bitmap versions at the smallest sizes look wonderful, here are examples at 8 and 9pt without ClearType:
http://localhostr.com/files/0cd916/capture.png
http://localhostr.com/files/f53f24/capture.png
If Windows had an option to disable ClearType at smaller sizes, I’d use this wherever I needed a monospaced font. But it’s just not very useful with smoothing.
LKM
15 June 2009 at 6:08 pm
It’s a pretty neat font, but I think it’s inferior to most other widely-liked monospace fonts. Namely, its stroke weight is not balanced. For example, the x in expenses in your first screenshot has more weight than the other characters; some characters have strokes with different weights that should have equal weights (such as the two middle strokes in the lower-case w) - at least in your screenshots. In my opinion, this typeface looks a slightly uneven and inconsistent.
Doug
15 June 2009 at 6:12 pm
Wow. That is one super-readable/scannable font!
JohnO
15 June 2009 at 7:47 pm
Love the font. Turned it on friday after work. Got to work monday morning and immediately noticed a positive difference. No way I’m switching back.
Kannan
20 July 2009 at 8:48 pm
I’ve tried to use this font in the past. But the point sizes and the weird slash through zero kept me away from this. Now that these are fixed, this is an amazing true type font. I particularly love this at 9 point in Windows and clear type turned off (I don’t like the cleartype anyway), which enables bitmap representation to show up. Now this font looks gorgeous.