I really like this visualization of the difference between Deja Vu Sans Mono and Apple Menlo:
(Credit to Jesse Burgheimer)
I decided to take a stab at programmatically generating a similar comparison for all the fonts I’ve been looking at. Here’s the Mathematica code:
(Click for full size version)
It was then easy to generate this for every pair of fonts:
I went through them all and picked out the ones I thought were most interesting:
If you’re interested in seeing the results for every pair, you can download them all.
If you’re really interested in typography, I recommend:
6 Comments
There seems to be some sort of quirk in Mathematica involving symbol characters– notice how things like ()!/ are not only exactly matched, but seriously out of place weight-wise in the font.
Alas, I don’t use Mathematica so I don’t know what the issue actually is…
You’re totally right! I’ll look into that and see if there’s a workaround.
Where is the facebook like link ?
A passage from the Book of Obscure Mathematica Features:
Style["( . ) ( . ) ", 60, FontFamily -> "Comic Sans MS",
PrivateFontOptions -> {"OperatorSubstitution" -> False}]
You are awesome. I’ll use this in a follow-up post.
Here’s how do do these in Go:
package main
import (
“os”
“fmt”
“github.com/ajstarks/svgo”
)
var (
canvas = svg.New(os.Stdout)
width = 900
height = 900
fontsize, glyph int
chars = “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789(){}[],.:;-+*/\\&_^%$#@!~`’\”"
)
func letters(top, left int, font, color string, opacity float32) {
rows := 7
cols := 13
glyph := 0
fontsize = 32
spacing := fontsize * 2
x := left
y := top
canvas.Gstyle(fmt.Sprintf(“font-family:%s;font-size:%dpt;text-anchor:middle;fill:%s;fill-opacity:%.2f”, font, fontsize, color, opacity))
for r := 0; r < rows; r++ {
for c := 0; c 2 {
canvas.Start(width, height)
canvas.Text(80, 520, os.Args[1], “font-size:14pt; fill:blue; font-family:”+os.Args[1])
canvas.Text(80, 540, os.Args[2], “font-size:14pt; fill:red; font-family:”+os.Args[2])
letters(100, 100, os.Args[1], “blue”, 0.5)
letters(100, 100, os.Args[2], “red”, 0.5)
canvas.End()
}
}
4 Trackbacks
[...] Fixed the issue with the operator symbols (Thanks MMA_Pope!) [...]
[...] Sans Mono ebensowenig verleugnen und jetzt gibt’s auch noch die Menlo. Wie man bei diesem Schriftvergleich sieht, sind die Unterschiede nicht wirklich riesig. Panic hat mit der Panic Sans, die im Editor [...]
[...] Inconsolata vs. Courier Image by ajstarks See: 1overn.com/2011/01/26/comparing-programming-font-pairs/ This entry was posted in Courier and tagged Courier, Fontcompare, Inconsolata. Bookmark the [...]
[...] Inconsolata vs. Courier Image by ajstarks See: 1overn.com/2011/01/26/comparing-programming-font-pairs/ This entry was posted in Courier and tagged Courier, Fontcompare, Inconsolata. Bookmark the [...]