In Search for a Font

Posted on: Tue, 05/15/2007 - 14:50 By: dae

As a computer engineer, you are more or less frequent yourself with programming, or at least something very close to programming and since we are not at the point where natural language can serve as a courier of our need to the computer yet, typing in a program, source code, HTML, etc. is still our de facto modus operandi. In programming, or more to say, typing a program, we do love our code tidy, we wish things to be aligned properly, i.e., we always stick with monospace font.

Of course, this verbiage is a common wisdom which is recognized by all PC. They already come with a handful of monospace, or the so-called fixed-width, font. Courier New is my favorite. Now, for Windows Vista, we have Consolas which is intended to dethrone Courier New. (Moreover, Vista and Office 2007 come packed with fix new fonts, Consolas included, two san-serif, two serif, one flared-serif and one monospace. See The Technology of Text for more information.

This is greatly appreciated. The only problem is that I am Thai. I need good monospace Thai font. There exist many monospace Thai font, of course, but none is good enough for my meticulous need. My current best monospace thai font is the Courier Mono Thai, created by Khun Settapol, which is based on the very popular Courier. There are also many more font such as Phaisarn Font, by Khun Phaisarn Techajaruwong, TlwgMono, by Thai Linux Working Group. These are good works but it still does not match my need. Most of these fonts can be downloaded from ZzzThai page while Tlwg Font can be found in the Tlwg page.

I need a font such that its English character is at least as good as Courier New. The current problem of the aforementioned font is that the stroke of English characters are ways too thin. Since Thai has over and under character, the line space has to be enlarged however, the stroke of the character is the same, rendering the character to appear very thin and is not as legible as it should be. On the other hand, th e Fixedsys font which comes bundled with Windows is ways too thick both in Thai characters and English characters. (Now, you believe that I am very picky.)

Anyway, Courier Thai is still my monospace Thai font of the choice, it is a good work, though. It is just not perfectly match my need. Let me hope that I would have enough time and energy to fix this issue, somehow.