I've written here about how to embed arbitrary fonts in a flash file. This approach works, but it has several downsides.

1. You have to have Flash. It's not necessarily cheap.
2. You have to go through a pretty arduous process to embed the fonts.
3. You end up with a swf file that can be quite large, especially if you have a lot of fonts you need to embed. This can have a very negative impact on your bandwidth and the user's experience with your site.

I understand that SilverLight has a method for using embedded fonts as well, though I've found very little information on it.

But I did recently come across True Font Family.

It's not a 100% solution, since it essentially replaces specifically styled text on your site with dynamic images of that text in the font of your choosing. But, it's got some great benefits.

• It's cheap, as in 27$, no royaties
• It's easy. Just a simple Javascript include, and a little CSS markup.
• It's double plus easy. You just upload the fonts you need to use as TTF files to your webserver somewhere. No messing with conversions of any kind. And since the fonts you use can be locked up in a secure spot on your server, there's no worries of font use violations that might come from allowing end users to actually download the fonts you need for your site.

Plus, they've got a newer version coming out sometime in the fall that'll do all sorts of special effects on the text as it's rendering it.

Depending on your needs, this might be a very viable alternative to Flash.

I blogged about fonts quite a while back here.

But I thought I'd add a reference to a new font I just stumbled across by DamienG on his blog, called Envy Code R.

I especially like his italics as bold trick that enables you to have Italics comments in Visual Studio even though VS only has an option for bold, even in VS2008.

Envy Code R

Pretty good, but a bit compressed, note the small M. To me, the verticals are so close together, they blur a bit. It's also a tad taller than Consolas.

Even if you don't care for the font, his VS color schemes, particularly Humane, are definitely worth a try.

Very nice.

Consolas with his bold-italics trick would be a very nice VS2008 font indeed. Hmmm.

I've noticed something a bit peculiar about fonts and programmers.

There's the camp that's thoroughly researched the topic, experimented with piles of fonts and ended up selecting one that they can be quite vocal about.

And then there's the camp there never changes the default that came setup in the IDE they installed.

I guess I come from the former. Courier? No way. Arial? Ack! Programming in a variable width font just seems, so, ewww. I was a good, old fashioned FixedSys man for ages. It was decent, had a nice fixed width, slightly too bold, but I could live with it, came with every copy of windows and was pretty legible across all the common characters. But about a year ago, I embarked on a quest to find a better font.

Many, many downloads later, I believe I've ended up with the best of the options out there. The freely available ones, anyway.

I've taken screen snapshots of all fonts at approximately 14pt size. I used 14pt because it's the most comfortable size for me.

I've also included a snapshots of the better fonts at different sizes, so you can get a feel for how they scale.

Bitmap fonts

I'm not a big fan of the bitmap fonts (the FON files). They don't scale well except where they've been defined at multiple sizes (not really scaling), and don't believe they take advantage of ClearType, certainly not very well. Still, there are some interesting bitmap fonts out there.

Most of the good ones are intended to be used as very small fonts. If you have eagle vision, some of them might work quite well. But my eyes would jump screaming from my their sockets if I tried to program in some of these all day.

	10x20-iso8859-1.fon	Not bad but it doesn't scale. Some elements bleed too much.
	9x15-iso8859-1.fon	Too thin for me
	9x18-iso8859-1.fon	Also too thin
	BSUKermit.FON	Base size is too small. Doesn't scale
	Dina.fon	Base size is too small. Doesn't scale
	DOSLIKE.FON	Not bad, but it doesn't scale. Has a few too many serifs for my taste.
	GwdTE_437.fon	Base size is too small. Doesn't scale
	Hyperlt.fon	Actually called HyperFont LT
	IBMPC.fon	10pt. Yikes. Quite small.
	IBMPC.fon	14pt. This is what happens when bad fonts scale.
	PROFONT.FON	12pt. Too small, and the letters bleed together at this size.
	PROFONT.FON	14pt. Way too thick at this size, plus kerning is wacked.
	Raize.fon	10pt. Not too bad, but too small for me.
	Raize.fon	14pt. There's just something about the letter shapes at this size that don't feel right.
	Sysmono.fon	As close to 14pt as I can get with this font.

True Type Fonts

I prefer the true type fonts. They scale well all the way down to about 7 points, but they can take advantage of ClearType, and a few are even specially designed to make optimal use of it.

	Arial.ttf	14pt. Just for reference, a variable width font just doesn't work for me and programming.
	Aerial Mono.ttf	14pt. Pretty good. Seems a bit too bold.
	Andale Mono.ttf	14pt. Quite good. This one was in the running for a while.
	AnonymousRegular.ttf	14pt. Yikes, serifs and programming just don't mix.
	AnonymousRegular.ttf	11pt. Smaller size, same serif problems. I do like the zero, however.
	Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.ttf	14pt. Excellent font. Maybe just a tad too bold, but this one was also in the running.
	Consolas.ttf	14pt. Excellent all around.
	Consolas.ttf	10pt. For reference. Scales well.
	Everson Mono Unicode.ttf	14pt. Very good, but the letters seem to be a bit thinner than numbers and symbols, which looks odd to me.
	Fixedsys.ttf	14pt, note this is the TTF version of the FixedSys font, not the bitmapped version. It's too heavy for me.
	HyperFont.ttf	14pt. Not bad but similar problems to Everson Mono.
	Larabiefont Bold.ttf	14pt. Wow. Those zeros. oh, wow. Screams l33t!
	Letter Gothic Line.ttf	14pt. This one's not too bad, but check out the lower case m's. Funky.
	Monaco.ttf	14pt. Excellent font. Originally from the Mac. the parens are a little odd, but this was definitely in the running.
	PixelCarnageMonoTT.ttf	14pt. Hmm, seems small for 14pt. Decent, but not right for me.
	ProFontWindows.ttf	14pt. The "u", "n" and "c" threw me. This is just a little too "programming in the FUTURE.. FUTURE.. FUTURE.. FUTURE".
	ProggyCleanTT.ttf	Intended to be used small. Ouch, my eyes!
	Reader Sans Roman.ttf	14pt. Funky horizontals.
	Terminal.ttf	12pt. Decent, available, a bit thick in general.
	Terminal.ttf	8pt. Fine if you don't mind going blind at 30.
	Ti92Pluspc.ttf	14pt. Not bad but a little tall for my taste. Any shorter, though, and it gets too thin.
	Topaz-8.ttf	14pt. Ugh. Someone actually recommends this?

Finding the Fonts

I found all these fonts through various sites. Googling the font file name should get you where you want to be. I'm not sure as to posting the fonts for download here, so I'm erring on the side of safety. I apologize in advance for making you hunt them down.

The Winner

I chose Consolas in the end, for several reasons:

• It comes with the newer Windows and it's a VERY high quality font.
• The symbols aren't weird, and most of them, plus the parentheses, kind of 'pop', which I happen to like.
• It's got a good slashed zero
• Line spacing is nice. Not too tight or loose.
• It's thick enough to avoid strange looking "thin spots" but not so thick as to be annoying or have characters bleed (like Terminal)
• No pseudo-serifs (like Anonymous) 

I'm sure there's a lot more possibilities out there, but I didn't see them before I quit looking.

If you have a favorite font, let me know. If I can download it, and it's a serious programmer font, I'll add a sample. 

If you tell me you program in Comic Sans, somewhere, out there, a daemon will abend.