Testing Fonts for Software Developers

11. September, 2015

Characters that you need to be able to distinguish clearly:

0O – Zero and upper case o
l1I – Lower case L, one, upper case i
Z2 – Upper case z and two
S5 – Upper case s and five
G6 – Upper case g and six
B8 – Upper case b and eight
71 – seven and one
lI – Lower case L, upper case i
vy – lower case v and lower case y

Just copy and paste into your favorite code editor.

Fonts you should try:


New Font by Adobe: Source Code Pro

27. September, 2012

Some of us know that software not only has to work, it also should be beautiful.

One important aspect here is the font. How does this look:

1Il|iO0oB8

If you can’t tell for sure which character is which, you probably don’t use a good font.

Paul D. Hunt, a font designer working for Adobe, finally spent some time to make life for his fellow developer easier:

As a font developer, I spend a good chunk of each day coding in a text editor and reading output messages from a terminal window, so I can appreciate the importance of a good monospaced font. (source)

If you’re interested in font design, his blog post contains some of the ideas and decisions he made when designing the font. Btw, the text above looks like this in Source Code Pro:

Some potentially confusable characters

You can download the font on Sourceforge or look at the source at GitHub.


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