As those of you who have been around for awhile know, Irreal has a fascination with fonts for Emacs. I most recently wrote about them here. But, all those posts have been about coding fonts. Today, I want to talk about proportional fonts.
You can, of course use proportional fonts for coding but it’s mostly Rob Pike and his disciples that champion that. Still, most of use proportional fonts for everything else. Recently, Charles Choi even convinced me to write my posts in a proportional font.
This post was inspired by an article on the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font. It’s a font developed by the Braille Institute for low vision readers. Those of us without vision problems should also take notice because the font really is easy to read and, most importantly, it’s easy to distinguish among those hard to discern characters that I use to decide if a font is acceptable for programming use.
It’s usually not as important to distinguish them in a prose environment but most programmers are anal about things like that and would prefer having clarity in all the text that they read. Take a look at the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font article to see it in action and to see how well it distinguishes among all those problematic characters.
For me, one of the worst problems with proportional fonts is telling the difference between capital I (eye) and lowercase l (ell). As I write this in Emacs using my proportional font, those two letters look virtually the same. That’s a problem I wouldn’t have if I were using Inconsolata, my coding font. Atkinson Hyperlegible makes the difference clear. That alone is worth adopting the font.
You can download the font for free but the Braille Institute would appreciate a contribution. This seems like a great font and is worth a contribution to help the Institute in their work.