A Condensed Monospaced Font

When the time comes for my graduate students to write their project reports, I give them a long checklist of do's and don'ts. One of the more vexing issues is the code font. I am astonished how many people who have been programming for years are unaware that computer code is usually presented in a monospaced font, like this. Of course, they soon discover that their word processor has a Courier (or Courier New) font for this purpose. Next, they discover that Courier is awfully wide. If you write on letter size paper with an inch of margin on each side, and you use 12 point Courier , you can fit 65 characters on a line. That's not a lot. With 10 point Courier, that goes up to 78. But if you want to indent your displayed code by half an inch, you are back to 72 characters. And anyway, 10 point Courier looks awful when combined with 12 point Times. At that point, I tell them that they should just use a condensed font. When they ask “which font”, I mumble something about Googling for it, but I don't recall anyone ever following through. Instead, they stick with Courier and tediously reformat their code to fit the printed page. Why don't I just point them to a font? For my Sun Press Java books, I used a Lucida Typewriter Narrow font that Sun commissioned years ago. But I can't give my copy to others, and I can't find any source on the web. Googling for it yields two hits (probably three by t...

Date: November, 22 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2010/11/21/condensed-monospaced-font

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