Apart from being free, the differences seem to be:
- Comic Code is more heavily serifed - Comic Mono is "semi-serif" (a balanced blend between serif mono fonts & the sans-serif Comic Sans). Not sure why they both didn't go full sans-serif: I generally prefer serif code fonts but of these two I prefer the less seriffed variation, and Comic Sans literally has Sans in the name.
- Comic Code is more legible (for me) - the widths & kerning seem to leave clearer letter separation with equivalent character spacing.
- Comic Mono has nicer kerning (to my eye) - while legibility is a problem at small font-sizes, at larger font-sizes Comic Mono is more pleasing to read.
Comic Sans is not a bad font, but people make fun of it because it is used where it shouldn't be. (I blame WordArt and its attitudes for most typography atrocities)
> Use of the OpenDyslexic font did not enhance text readability or reading speed. The study participants strongly preferred Verdana or Helvetica over the OpenDyslexic alternative.
Great article! That take on the study kinda disputes your authoritative stance on the issue, though, and for good reason IMO
That they did best with the font sets that they were most likely to have been exposed to in the past does not necessarily mean that those fonts are the best for everyone.
Sadly this might not be true; most careful research on fonts have shown that font choices does not help people with dyslexia, even including fonts specifically designed for the purpose.
Fantasque Sans Mono is similar in spirit and works great for coding too IMHO: https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans/ Don't knock it until you try it, it really looks nice for clean languages without a lot of symbols, operators or noise.
Fantasque Sans Mono is my favorite as well, and is the only font I use for coding (in Vim, VScode, Ryder, etc...). The slight hint of style makes it so easy to read, and not boring (unlike other monospace fonts). It's free and good alternative to Comic Code, which is not free. I don't like the loop on k, so I use the version with non-looped k. Before it, I was on Nanum Gothic, which had the ideal spacing/size for editor.
I also quite like Fantasque Sans Mono. Few years ago they even added programming ligatures support. Some like them but I don't, so I keep using the previous 1.7.2 version of the font that does not contain ligatures (not all programs allow disabling ligatures).
It looks cool, but one problem at least on my laptop screen when looking at the small rendering, is that the l and i in the word multi look too similar. I have to lean in to differentiate them. It looks like multl to me.
For the word split, it is easier to tell since they are side-b by-each, but still weird to look at without zooming in.
It's easy enough when either rendered as a larger font size, or if you lean in. But when small, those two letters are difficult.
Man I unironically love Fantasque Sans Mono (using it for nearly 5 years now) and I'm so glad someone else also brought this one up. Idk, I feel like Comic Sans hate was always a bit much, even ironic hate, and I'm just glad to see another typeface project inspired by it.
I've been using it ever since I dropped mononoki. So, about 3 years ago. Looks great, and quite readable for me. More so than OP's.
I think that it's due to the really tall x-height, and the fact that letters sray 'in-line'. OP's 's' in particular goes terribly below baseline. Not sure if using the proper term here.
For me, it doesn't seem to matter which font I use, as long as I keep using it for an extended period of time, then it become the "easy to read" font. Some with line spacing, indentation, etc. Then, anything else looks terrible.
I wonder how much of font design is driven by each authors "local indentation in the font space". What's the push to move that indentation?
I have the opposite reaction - I switch fonts every now and then because using a different font makes it more fun/feels fresh. Likewise for color schemes.
I used this one for a long time, then switched to the Recursive variable font. It also comes with several non-variable alternatives (for editors that don't support variable which is most of them) called "Rec Mono". I particularly enjoyed Rec Mono Duotone.
Mainly more referring to https://github.com/shannpersand/comic-shanns, but the capital forms seem to very quickly leave a blocky feel, e.g. IT visually combining, NE visually combining. I do wonder if it would be possible to systematically adjust the kerning, la using openCV or similar to detect such things.
I have set the font for this page and there's no confusion. 1 has slope, I double serif, l the top serif only to the left, O clean, 0 with bar and the bar in Ø is wider than the circle.
So it's nice, but Fantasque Mono is still more legible for my eyes in general.
Based on a skim of the write-up, it seems like the author passed a respin of comic sans through a couple scripts, maybe you could start from where they started and try to locate a nice continuous “shittyness” knob to tune.
Fantastic idea. OpenAI knocked it out of the park with their fake typing animation, but they (we!) need to apply it to ethics work. Handwritten fonts, intentional typos, grainy c. 2010 avatars attached to messages - the possibilities are endless…
The i, l, and f serifs feel extremely non-comic to me. It's not right if it's not sans. IMO https://www.dafont.com/pointfree.font is a better monospace comic font.
I was curious why it seems so much nicer than Comic Sans (and many commenters here seem to agree).
Many of the letterforms have been dramatically "straightened" -- a Comic Sans "m" is kind of hideous, with the three vertical strokes intentionally all at different angles... whereas in this one they're all essentially vertical.
Comic Sans is ugly because it's terribly proportioned (intentionally) to mimic the way a child would write. But when you straighten everything and the letters necessarily fit into a grid... it's just much, much nicer aesthetically.
Just a gentle "handwriting mono" font, rather than the original which is (again, intentionally) horribly kerned and where half the letterforms feel like they're about to topple over from imbalance.
This is largely because it was specifically designed to be readable on low resolution screens without sub-pixel rendering (which wasn't a thing at the time as on a great many Windows machines you could only really rely on the standard 16 colour palette). It is also part of why other fonts with similar target aesthetics look much better in print and on more modern devices - techniques used to improve it for low resolution use have a detrimental effect when not using it that way.
> The main criticism is in its overuse.
The second is inappropriate use. It is still the better choice for child-hand-like writing if you are targeting 4-or-8-bit/pixel displays at 640*480 resolution (or not much more) on ~14 inch devices, but how many times is it actually used that way?
If you look at the font, it's quite clearly extremely "irregular" in a way that children's handwriting is, and comic book speech bubbles very much are not meant to be.
Indeed, the creator used some comics as a starting point, but then tried to redraw the strokes with a mouse (!), and intentionally drew them wrong, not keeping them straight, etc.
So the goal was not to reproduce comic speech bubbles at all, but to create something instead "strange and childlike". You would never want to use it for actual comic book lettering.
From an interview [1]:
> They wanted all kinds of fonts – a lot of them strange and childlike. One program was called Microsoft Bob, which was designed to make computers more accessible to children. I booted it up and out walked this cartoon dog, talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense.
> So I had an idea to make a comic-style text and started looking at Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, graphic novels where the hand lettering was like a typeface... Instead, I looked at various letters and tried to mimic them on screen. There were no sketches or studies – it was just me drawing with a mouse, deleting whatever was wrong.
> I didn’t have to make straight lines, I didn’t have to make things look right, and that’s what I found fun. I was breaking the typography rules. My boss Robert Norton, whose mother Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers, said the “p” and “q” should mirror each other perfectly. I said: “No, it’s supposed to be wrong!”
It seems like this isn't very well known, but the design of Comic Sans is actually intended to help children with dyslexia. The creator of Comic Sans also talks about this in his lectures. Listening to him talk about the design of the typeface changed my perception of it.
I know it's useful for dyslexics but I've not seen anyone claim it was intentionally designed with that intent and I'm pretty sure that has been explained to be a happy coincidence in the past.
Ref2 doesn't state that, and I can't do video right now.
Thank you for the correction. I thought I had read it was part of the initial design consideration at one point, but reading about
it further again, I think the discovery that it helped dyslexic readers happened after the typeface was made public.
It is still an interesting aspect of the typeface that doesn't get much attention though, although there are other typefaces that also try to help with dyslexia.
If you are interested in design, I still recommend watching the talk when you have the time. It has been a while since I watched it, but the designer is well spoken.
It is a good question, I have read mixed reports about the effectiveness as well. Besides specific typefaces, there are also techniques like bionic reading.
The story I've always heard (which is backed up by Wikipedia) is that Comic Sans was designed for the speech bubbles of characters in Microsoft Bob, to make them seem less "formal" and more relatable. The fact that the letterforms are "terribly proportioned," as u/crazygringo says, is what actually makes the letters easier for dyslexic people to distinguish.
Also some of the issues that cause it to be badly formed/hinted/kerned in print and on decent resolution devices, are because it was specifically optimised to be readable on the low-res screens that were ubiquitous at the time (also a time when sub-pixel-rendering support wasn't a thing either, at least not on Windows, to increase the effective resolution).
And I just installed selected this in Rider, I’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow while working. It doesn’t look bad, but I think I prefer Cascadia Code which also has a bit of playfulness.
I've been using this as my standard font for maybe 1-2 years now (no, I am not joking). While I don't think that the font is any more legible than other fonts, the quirkiness and the character of the font makes it rather enjoyable to look at.
If legibility is an issue then I would seriously recommend increasing the font size, I think that will do much more than choice of "most optimal" font. And if increased font size makes your code "harder to read", consider that someone else might be unable to use a smaller font and will be forced to read code with a larger font size.
Daily driver for me as well, but only for terminal. People laugh sometimes while pair programming, but usually by the end they begin to really like it. Can't use anything else at this point.
143 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] thread[0] https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code
- Comic Code is more heavily serifed - Comic Mono is "semi-serif" (a balanced blend between serif mono fonts & the sans-serif Comic Sans). Not sure why they both didn't go full sans-serif: I generally prefer serif code fonts but of these two I prefer the less seriffed variation, and Comic Sans literally has Sans in the name.
- Comic Code is more legible (for me) - the widths & kerning seem to leave clearer letter separation with equivalent character spacing.
- Comic Mono has nicer kerning (to my eye) - while legibility is a problem at small font-sizes, at larger font-sizes Comic Mono is more pleasing to read.
- Comic Mono was built by a Python script by a non-designer as open source-ish
- Comic Code was built by a font designer with commercial intent
- Comic Code includes more font variants (italics, ligatures)
screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/jVeZKgh.png
theme: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Whalesal...
Comic Sans is not a bad font, but people make fun of it because it is used where it shouldn't be. (I blame WordArt and its attitudes for most typography atrocities)
> Use of the OpenDyslexic font did not enhance text readability or reading speed. The study participants strongly preferred Verdana or Helvetica over the OpenDyslexic alternative.
https://blog.dyslexia.com/good-fonts-for-dyslexia-an-experim...
https://www.boia.org/blog/do-dyslexia-fonts-improve-accessib...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5629233/
https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html
[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
For the word split, it is easier to tell since they are side-b by-each, but still weird to look at without zooming in.
It's easy enough when either rendered as a larger font size, or if you lean in. But when small, those two letters are difficult.
I think that it's due to the really tall x-height, and the fact that letters sray 'in-line'. OP's 's' in particular goes terribly below baseline. Not sure if using the proper term here.
I wonder how much of font design is driven by each authors "local indentation in the font space". What's the push to move that indentation?
Sometimes I wonder what my employer’s IT department would think of me, having installed so many font files on my machine.
I also switch color themes regularly. Do you do that too?
EDIT:
Trying it out now, it's actually a lot nicer than I initially thought. I had to bump the text size up which was already larger than 14.
I think it sits between the submitted font and Monaco in terms of "seriousness".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_(typeface)
So it's nice, but Fantasque Mono is still more legible for my eyes in general.
Or per function, depending on test coverage & code quality…
Based on a skim of the write-up, it seems like the author passed a respin of comic sans through a couple scripts, maybe you could start from where they started and try to locate a nice continuous “shittyness” knob to tune.
I always liked how legible comic sans is. I propose we try it on HN for a week
It teaches me not to take myself too seriously
I’ve been using the normal Comic Sans for 3-4 years now. I don’t mind the non-monospaced-ness.
Many of the letterforms have been dramatically "straightened" -- a Comic Sans "m" is kind of hideous, with the three vertical strokes intentionally all at different angles... whereas in this one they're all essentially vertical.
Comic Sans is ugly because it's terribly proportioned (intentionally) to mimic the way a child would write. But when you straighten everything and the letters necessarily fit into a grid... it's just much, much nicer aesthetically.
Just a gentle "handwriting mono" font, rather than the original which is (again, intentionally) horribly kerned and where half the letterforms feel like they're about to topple over from imbalance.
https://www.myfonts.com/collections/comic-code-font-tabular-...
This is largely because it was specifically designed to be readable on low resolution screens without sub-pixel rendering (which wasn't a thing at the time as on a great many Windows machines you could only really rely on the standard 16 colour palette). It is also part of why other fonts with similar target aesthetics look much better in print and on more modern devices - techniques used to improve it for low resolution use have a detrimental effect when not using it that way.
> The main criticism is in its overuse.
The second is inappropriate use. It is still the better choice for child-hand-like writing if you are targeting 4-or-8-bit/pixel displays at 640*480 resolution (or not much more) on ~14 inch devices, but how many times is it actually used that way?
No, it was intended to mimic the style of comic book lettering, hence the name.
Part of the reason Comic Sans is reviled is because not only is it a terrible font, but it is also a far cry from actual comic book lettering.
Indeed, the creator used some comics as a starting point, but then tried to redraw the strokes with a mouse (!), and intentionally drew them wrong, not keeping them straight, etc.
So the goal was not to reproduce comic speech bubbles at all, but to create something instead "strange and childlike". You would never want to use it for actual comic book lettering.
From an interview [1]:
> They wanted all kinds of fonts – a lot of them strange and childlike. One program was called Microsoft Bob, which was designed to make computers more accessible to children. I booted it up and out walked this cartoon dog, talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense.
> So I had an idea to make a comic-style text and started looking at Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, graphic novels where the hand lettering was like a typeface... Instead, I looked at various letters and tried to mimic them on screen. There were no sketches or studies – it was just me drawing with a mouse, deleting whatever was wrong.
> I didn’t have to make straight lines, I didn’t have to make things look right, and that’s what I found fun. I was breaking the typography rules. My boss Robert Norton, whose mother Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers, said the “p” and “q” should mirror each other perfectly. I said: “No, it’s supposed to be wrong!”
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/28/how-we-...
Ref: Vincent Connare: Comic Sans is the Best Font in the World https://youtu.be/xXdzBTeYZlE
Ref: https://www.nothingcomicaboutdyslexia.com/
I know it's useful for dyslexics but I've not seen anyone claim it was intentionally designed with that intent and I'm pretty sure that has been explained to be a happy coincidence in the past.
Ref2 doesn't state that, and I can't do video right now.
Edit: And neither does Ref1
It is still an interesting aspect of the typeface that doesn't get much attention though, although there are other typefaces that also try to help with dyslexia.
If you are interested in design, I still recommend watching the talk when you have the time. It has been a while since I watched it, but the designer is well spoken.
[1] https://opendyslexic.org/
Fwiw my dyslexic friends feel no benefit from these fonts. Would love to hear other experiences.
https://www.indwes.edu/adult-graduate/ng-blog/stories/what-i...
https://bionic-reading.com/
Sorry again, I thought I remembered the designer talking about this in the video I referenced. I should have watched it again before referencing it.
I wonder if there are different sub-variants of dyslexia that work on different principles?
It gets mentioned in every single comment section I see on Comic Sans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Sans#History
Looks like a good Friday font or for that codebase you despise opening, or a perfect prank for a developer who left their computer unlocked.
And I just installed selected this in Rider, I’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow while working. It doesn’t look bad, but I think I prefer Cascadia Code which also has a bit of playfulness.
If legibility is an issue then I would seriously recommend increasing the font size, I think that will do much more than choice of "most optimal" font. And if increased font size makes your code "harder to read", consider that someone else might be unable to use a smaller font and will be forced to read code with a larger font size.
I'm going to have to set it as my editor font and see how it goes.
[0] https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/