Inconsolata: font for coding

[Mordasius]

..Finally I can try all those monospace fonts i downloaded and never used because they looked ugly on my system.

Having good-looking monospaced fonts also increases the occasions when you might choose to use the Lua string.format to display text. For example, you use a single string meter to display a left formatted label, a right formatted value and a centered note all at the same time.

Code: Select all

SKIN:Bang( '!SetOption', 'oneLineMeter', 'Text',  string.format("%-20s %5d %9s", strLabel, intValue, strNote) ) 

This is an efficient way to display tables but string.format only formats the text correctly if you use a monospaced font. The downside is that you can only use a True Type font (.ttf) with Rainmeter so you'll have to convert inconsolata.otf to inconsolata.ttf. I've no idea what effect this has on the quality of the font but assume there was a reason for using the Open Type font format in the first place.

[Alex Becherer]

please correct me if i am wrong, but doesn't Rainmeter use GDI+? so it's font smoothing should have nothing to with the system wide font smoothing.

[jsmorley]

Having good-looking monospaced fonts also increases the occasions when you might choose to use the Lua string.format to display text. For example, you use a single string meter to display a left formatted label, a right formatted value and a centered note all at the same time.

Code: Select all

SKIN:Bang( '!SetOption', 'oneLineMeter', 'Text',  string.format("%-20s %5d %9s", strLabel, intValue, strNote) ) 

This is an efficient way to display tables but string.format only formats the text correctly if you use a monospaced font. The downside is that you can only use a True Type font (.ttf) with Rainmeter so you'll have to convert inconsolata.otf to inconsolata.ttf. I've no idea what effect this has on the quality of the font but assume there was a reason for using the Open Type font format in the first place.

This is a clever little idea. You should really post this in http://rainmeter.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=99&t=9185.

[Alex Becherer]

here's another great monospaced font just released by Adobe as open source:

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcecodepro.adobe/

if you like it you should also get the matching font family (also open source):
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/08/source-sans-pro.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcesans.adobe/

[MerlinTheRed]

Thanks for that. I installed it, but somehow I still can't get away from Consolas. Perhaps it would look nicer with that font renderer you posted about earlier, but that one has some problems with cutting off letters that I can't just ignore.

[Alex Becherer]

interesting. i never noticed anything like that. would you be so kind to post some more details on this issue?
(i heard that MS will go away from Cleartype and back to greyscale rendering in Windows 8, so i would like to inform the developer of any issues)