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So, today (2015-11-16) I finally found the answer to the ultimate question, "in lieu of -misc-fixed, what's the best font for gvim, or gnome-terminal, or lxterminal, or roxterming". Well, the answer is much simpler than I imagined. For years, yes, years, perhaps near a decade, I've been trying to answer that question. I've tried:
- Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
- Courier (Yuck!)
- DejaVu Sans Mono (ok-ish)
- FreeMono
- Hack
- Inconsolata
- Liberation Mono (ok)
- Monospace
- Orca (yuck, yuck)
Why are these all so terrible? Well, simple test that I have for fonts is:
- PFPF WMWM these must be separated and simple to distinguish
- i l 1 L | must be easy to tell apart
- o O 0 ditto for these
Of all the fonts, the one which has always been simple to work with, never lets me down and never smudges a character is:
fixed medium normal 14
So, why is it so hard to find? The answer is that the distro has been hiding it from me. Today, the glorious answer came forth and bit me:
# rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
# /usr/bin/fc-cache -fv
Now, everything* just works, 'Fixed' is available from the font pickers, gvim looks a heck of a lot easier to read and I'm a proud geezer again.
Well, not everything, firefox it seems wants to use some of the newly available bitmap fonts when web page style sheets wish to use something obscure. Well, to combat this I've told firefox to not use page specified fonts, and happily I note that things have suddenly become a lot more readable there too, much better sizing too. Again, wow. What an improvement.
Why isn't this be the default? Why for so long was this hidden away? If I'm a text editor, or a terminal, these non-TTF fonts should be available. If I'm a word processor, perhaps it's best that the non-scaling fonts are hidden.
