About → User Interface

In today’s world of flashy GUIs and complicated IDEs, default font selection seems to be nothing but a short afterthought. I experienced a prime example of this earlier today while working with Processing. I should first point out that I am a huge fan of Processing and this should in no way discourage anyone from trying it. It’s ridiculously easy to use (assuming you are familiar with basic Java) and people have done some pretty interesting visualization stuff with it.

So earlier I was busy working on a program (”sketch” in Processing lingo) and needed to reference a variable I had created earlier. It’s name was 2 characters, lowercase ‘e’ followed by…hmmm, is that a numeric one or a lowercase ‘L’? Can’t remember what I typed, so I tried both, no good. It turns out the problem was something else entirely, but it made me take a step back and really examine the default Processing font. I moved to a blank line and typed a numeric one followed by a lowercase “L”. Here’s what showed up:

Hmm well that looks pretty hard to tell apart, let’s blow that up:

Wait, what order did I type those in again?

Well that’s interesting, the lowercase ‘L’ has a vertical column that’s one pixel thicker than the numeric one, what the hell?

Why would a font designer in their right mind make 2 characters look virtually identical? I say “virtually” because you can sort of tell when they are blown up ~13.5x and are directly next to each other, but even then there is still no way of knowing which one is which unless you recall the order you typed them. The entire point of character sets are to uniquely identify individual language constructs. Here you can’t even tell if it’s a numeric digit or a letter. That seems like a pretty big failure.

Even worse, why would a team creating a programming language + IDE on top of Java (that’s built around the concept of graphics and visualization) choose a font like this? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

There are a ton more shitty-font examples out there (similar characters, hard to read punctuation, etc) that I won’t get into. So what’s the solution here? Use a font built for programming! A simple Google search for “programming font” will get you this useful site. I’m partial to Profont / Sheldon. They are pretty small and can look cluttered when there is a lot of dense code on the screen, but they are always easily readable. Perhaps one day all IDEs will be developed with the understanding that there is more to a programming font than monospacing.