Tag font

2011-01-06

Inconsolata Hellenic!

Update: Please check the Software page often as the font has been getting some work after this post was made. Make sure you use the latest version before reporting an issue. Four years ago I stumbled upon Raph Levien’s excellent font, Inconsolata. It was great, not just because I loved its æsthetics, but also because […]

2010-12-24

Hellenic in Prelude: Font Design Failure

Prelude is the font bundled with WebOS in HP/Palm’s Palm Pre. I first saw it, and wrote about it, last summer, a bit after the device went on sale. Back then I wrote that the font was fantastic, but didn’t include any non-Roman characters. Apparently I was wrong. Eighteen months passed since then, a time […]

2009-10-27

A Slashed-Zero Droid Sans Mono

Due to popular demand, here is a slashed zero version of the Droid Sans Mono font. My previous modification to the Droid Sans Mono, the Dotted-Zero variant, remains available at the same URL for those that prefer dots to slashes.

2009-06-13

Palm Pre's Custom Font 'Prelude'

While the Palm Pre is intriguing in many respects, I am not particularly excited about its User Interface; it's modern and has that 'new' feel that seems to be gone from the iPhone [something Android never had] and it seems sophisticated and well-designed from a usability point of view, but it also seems somewhat busy and over-the-top æsthetically. One of the things that did catch my eye, however, is the new font that the Pre includes. Very similar to Avenir, the font, apparently called Prelude, is a sans-serif design with good readability and a look that makes it distinguishable from many other fonts in use in modern operating systems today. There are various reports online stating that Prelude does not support non-Roman character sets, such as Hellenic, Cyrillic, or East-asian. I'm not even sure how good its support is for Central European languages either. If this is true, it strikes me as very naive on Palm's part: given that this is a font that was custom designed in 2008 (?) for a product that's bound to be internationally sold, proper international character support should've been a high priority. If anything the omission will make the Pre much less attractive to customers outside of North America and Western Europe, something that other companies learnt the hard way over the years. Hopefully Palm won't have to do so too.

2009-01-25

A Dotted-Zero Droid Sans Mono

For the programmers out there. Now that the controversy regarding the licence of the Droid font family included in Android is over --- and it's clear that the fonts are licensed under the Apache licence --- I am releasing a dotted version of the Droid Sans Mono, monospaced font that I am using for development (usually its either that or Liberation Mono nowadays). I prefer the dotted zero to a slashed zero in most monospaced fonts. More information can be found in the software page. I used FontForge to edit the font, so --- since some of the hinting instructions are not supported by this application --- I've scraped them and used the built-in autohinter. If you wish to use the modified font, they are --- of course --- also provided under the Apache licence, like the original. As always, your comments are very welcome.