Subject: Please don't use specific monospace fonts
Since programmers tend to be quite particular in their choice of monospace font, it's best to just use "monospace" in your CSS and trust their judgement. The user can easily configure their own font preference locally. There's no reason to specify e.g. "Monaco" or "Courier New" and it only risks invoking an unwanted font from the user's collection (I've personally had to rename those two to prevent them from frequently showing up on the web in place of DejaVu. GitHub is among the guilty).
Support Staff 2 Posted by Tekkub on 17 Oct, 2009 07:19 PM
I'm afraid the font choice is something our designers want. If there are fonts you don't want to use, I'd advise you to remove them from your system so that your browser will fall back to the default "monospace" font instead... but it sounds like you've already done this.
3 Posted by jedediah on 17 Oct, 2009 07:52 PM
Your designers likely aren't getting what they want since those fonts don't render very predictably on platforms they weren't made for.
But more importantly, what do your users want?
4 Posted by nathan on 18 Oct, 2009 05:37 AM
As a user, I can say I'm happy they are picking an actual font for me rather than whatever my browser might choose as default. Getting a consistent well designed experience is something I value greatly in a web app. Having to configure every little setting to get something that looks good is not what I want to spend my time doing.
Support Staff 5 Posted by Tekkub on 18 Oct, 2009 07:53 AM
The only users that have said anything about fonts have been linux users. Specifically, they wanted DejaVu at a higher priority than Bitstream, as it is more up-to-date. Our current monospace stack is
Monaco, "Courier New", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", monospace... Monaco being the preferred font, with some fallbacks, and of course the default monospace if all else fails.6 Posted by jedediah on 18 Oct, 2009 11:53 AM
Why list the default fonts that you would have gotten with "monospace" anyway? This will either do nothing or it will override the user's custom font and annoy them. If somebody has more than one of those first three, it's because they know what they're doing.
7 Posted by kevin on 03 Nov, 2009 03:47 PM
I'm a bit annoyed too that I have Consolas set as my browser's default monospaced font, but I see all code on GitHub in Courier New. Chrome seems to lack an extension to do site-specific CSS modifications, too. You guys should really add a pref for this!
8 Posted by Sebastiaan Deckers on 15 Nov, 2009 05:27 PM
+1 for Consolas because it's vastly superior to Courier.
Courier doesn't seem to scale well, it becomes completely pixelated (tested on Win7, FF3.5.5 with ClearType on).
This is the CSS current rule:
#files .file .data pre, #files .file .line-data { font-family:'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono','Courier',monospace;
font-size:115%;
}
Please add Consolas as follows:
#files .file .data pre, #files .file .line-data { font-family:'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono','Consolas','Courier',monospace;
font-size:115%;
}
If your designers are serious about the typography and choice of font they should add the @font-face CSS rule to simply embed the font. Read: http://nicewebtype.com/notes/2009/10/30/how-to-use-css-font-face/
9 Posted by Alex on 18 Nov, 2009 05:44 AM
The font you force hurts my eyes, please just let us decide which monospace font we want to see. I cannot believe your designers really want us to see the ugly and unreadable Courier New.