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Summary: need a font similar to Courier to use for code
Subject:Summary: need a font similar to Courier to use for code From:"Gilda Spitz" <gspitz -at- longview -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 27 Jun 2001 09:32:54 -0400
Thank you to everyone who replied to my posting yesterday. For those who
are interested, here's a summary:
Many of you suggested that I condense the Courier font a bit, (easily
done in either Word or FrameMaker). I should have mentioned in my
original posting that I had already tried that, but didn't gain enough
real estate to make it worthwhile. So that's why I was looking for a
different font.
Some of the suggestions:
* American Typewriter
* Modern
* courier new (microsoft typography)
* andale mono [aka monotype] (microsoft typography)
* letter gothic (used to come with IBM selectrics, font available
from several sources, also bitstream's 500 font CD, i think)
* orator (several sources - like letter gothic on steroids)
* OCR-A (several sources)
* OCR-B (several sources)
* Lucida Sans Typewriter (several sources, the original true type
font pack from MS had this one)
* Prestige Elite (adobe)
And the winner is... Lucida Sans Unicode, suggested by Robert Campbell:
"set to 85% of the body text size, and the stretch set to 84.5% - sounds
odd, but it looks code-ish and professional, and gives a lot more
characters per line... (BTW, those are the FM6 settings - for MSWord,
try the same 85% of body text size and, in the Character Spacing tab in
the Format > Font menu, set Scale to 85% and Spacing to Condensed by
1pt...)"
After some experimentation, we learned that Lucida definitely allows
more characters per line. It also looks a bit more modern, and therefore
gives our template a much-needed facelift.
Thanks to everyone.
Gilda Spitz
Manager, Documentation
Longview Solutions Inc.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gilda Spitz
> Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 10:23 AM
> To: Techwr-l (E-mail)
> Subject: need a font similar to Courier to use for code
>
> Quick question about fonts:
>
> We need to supply samples of code in our text. Traditionally we've
> used Courier because it looks like code. The problem is this:
>
> Courier takes up so much space that even short lines of code wrap to
> the next line. It would be preferable to have the lines stay together
> without wrapping, if possible.
>
> Is there a font similar to Courier that takes up less space? I tried
> Arial, and it solves the wrapping problem, but it doesn't really look
> like code to me.
>
> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Gilda Spitz
> Manager, Documentation
> Longview Solutions Inc.
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