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In search of a good proportional sans-serif font
This week I searched on fontlibrary.org for a proportional sans-serf font that displays different glyphs for upper-case ‘i’, lower-case ‘L’, the digit ‘1’ (one), and the vertical bar. Many fonts use nearly identical glyphs for these, which can be vexing for a programmer.
KDE has a font viewing tool that lets the user enter arbitrary text for displaying a sample. I used the following text:
UC(i),LC(L),ONE,BAR=I,l,1,| Oh,Zero=O,0 Uu Vv Ww
Many of the sans-serif fonts at Font Library suffer from the same problem as the one I was trying to solve: nearly identical glyphs for some characters. I found the following that didn’t have that issue.
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Comme Regular
- Comme is a fork from the Oxygen Font family by Vernon Adams, designed for Free desktops and UIs.
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Go Regular
- A family of high-quality WGL4 TrueType fonts, created by the Bigelow & Holmes type foundry specifically for the Go project
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Linik Sans
- Linik Sans is developed from Inter, version 3.3, and Manix Sans HL fonts. The changes are: truly tabular figures, ‘6’ changed so it doesn’t look like a rotated ‘9’, and tailed ‘l’
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LVC Sans Regular
- LVC Sans is a modification of IBM Plex Sans fonts - the key modifications are the glyphs containing “g” and the use of a slashed zero. This family contains only four weights.
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Recurso Sans
- Recurso Sans is developed from fonts Recursive Sans Linear. Changes are made to make the characters more legible, such as the dotted ‘0’ and ‘l’
Overall it’s a tie between Linik Sans and LVC Sans Regular. Linik Sans is more versatile because it has 18 variations: Thin, Thin Italic, Extra Light, Extra Light Italic, Light, Light Italic, Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Demi Bold, Demi Bold Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Extra Bold, Extra Bold Italic, Black, and Black Italic. However, its digits, while nice and legible, are fairly wide: note the years of Babbage’s birth and death below, and the value of pi.
Both fonts have a “slashed” zero, while I prefer a “dotted” zero.
| Your browser's default | Linik Sans | LVC Sans Regular |
|---|---|---|
|
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ‘On two occasions I have been asked,—“Pray, Mr. Babbage,
if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come
out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a
member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to
apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a
question.’ π = 3.14159265358979323846 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. |
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ‘On two occasions I have been asked,—“Pray, Mr. Babbage,
if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come
out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a
member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to
apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a
question.’ π = 3.14159265358979323846 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. |
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ‘On two occasions I have been asked,—“Pray, Mr. Babbage,
if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come
out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a
member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to
apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a
question.’ π = 3.14159265358979323846 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. |
Including a font from fontlibrary.org in an HTML file:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="https://fontlibrary.org/face/lvc-sans"/> <p style="font-family: LVCSansRegular"> The quick fox jumps over the lazy brown dog </p>