The despised Comic Sans reincarnates as a redesigned programming font

Rather than standardizing on one font, we should standardize on the ability to change those fonts at will.

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I picked this out of a list because it’s readable and distinguishes 0/O and 1/I/l well and then was mortified to discover it’s a Microsoft product

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Just a reminder that CERN uses Comic Sans for presentations because it makes them easier for everyone to read and follow.

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This I liked. Overpass Mono I chose. Will try again in a couple of days and see if I happen to choose it again.

Also, will need to try on another device. Different setups might make this interesting.

I shall also try my colleague on this. Which will they choose? Oh, this is fun!

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But does it have ligatures like Drama Sans ?

maybe an a, b, and c… for parking fines maybe…

Obligs.

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Except, you can’t actually read what’s written there. All the numbers have disappeared into a sea of JPEG artifacts.

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I have problems with this font. Not because it’s inspired by Comic Sans, but because everything feels so squished together. I also find l and 1 to be a little too similar.

I don’t hate it, but it definitely won’t be replacing my current preferred coding font (Hack).

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Nope. It might be inspired by lettering in comics, but that is not its purpose.

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Done that for the umpteenth time, with hidden font names.
Ended up as usual with JetBrains Mono and Source Code Pro as finalists.
I might try Fira Code - I use ligatures also with JetBrains - the shape of ‘r’ really used to put me off, but I just discovered there a less heavily serifed character variant.

But fonts for coding are as much a personal taste matter as editors or pizza toppings (Eclipse == Pineapple).

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Times New Roman meets Comic Sans

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People hate Comic Sans for the same reason they hate Nickleback - they’ve been repeatedly told that everyone hates it, and they should hate it to, so they follow the crowd and declare that they hate it. And much like Nickleback, most of them would be unable to identify it in a police lineup.

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…Are we allowed to get the police lineup to sing?

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It’s perfectly possible to detest Comic Sans because it is a terribly overworked font that is too often used outside its intended domain (presumably, things like elementary school signage or birthday party invitations for kids), much like Times Roman is too often used outside its intended domain (newspaper publishing). There are literally hundreds or thousands of perfectly adequate, widely available informal-looking fonts but people pick Comic Sans over and over and over and over again, for no discernible reason other than that it exists. Also some of its kerning information seems to be off, and that can make it an eyesore to many people who care about quality typesetting.

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It was made, but not used, for the MS Bob interface.

I’m not doing Comic Sans any favours here, am I?

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And it’s perfectly possible to detest Nickleback because they cut you off in traffic.

And you know perfectly well that the reason the vast majority of people who claim to hate either are doing so because it’s the “cool” thing to do that lets people know you’re in on the whole thing and a serious person to be taken seriously. And also that they have no idea what they’re talking about or hating. I have seen people rage against someone for “using comic sans” when said person was not using anything remotely comic sans. It’s virtue signalling, and it’s pointless.

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Here are three slides from the CERN announcement, in comic sans



So, it’s pretty garish. It doesn’t look dramatically worse after passing through the Coblis — Color Blindness Simulator – Colblindor though.

Subscripts and superscripts look a little small. It’s also conventional for the surd symbols bar to extend over the variable it modifies. These slides defy that convention.

For a presentation about sigmas. I’d expect the 𝝈 to be more readily distinguishable from o.

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Its purpose was to have a comic book inspired font for Microsoft 3D Movie Maker and the Microsoft Comic Chat IRC client. (Both of which were really cool for their time.)

Bob inspired its creation due to its own staid typography, but it came out later.

Now let’s get a monospaced version of Comic Parchment.

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We are in the middle of sending millions of people letters with login details that use a combination of uppercase, lowercase and numbers, which we have decided to use Arial to do so. So that’s going well. If they’d put any serif font, or even comic sans for fucks sake, as the font for the user id on the letter, it would have been fine, but nooooo.
Apparently, we are EIGHT MONTHS into the decision making process for amending a couple of words on another letter/form combo (why yes, I DO work for the public sector. How ever did you guess?)

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