I know people really hate Comic Sans, but it has some really useful properties.
One particularly useful property, especially in the education sector, is that dyslexics typically find it decidedly easier to read. Comic Sans uses distinct shapes for each character, e.g. no 'p' rotated to be 'q', and a variety of different sizes, all of which help make it easier for dyslexics.
* Good ascenders and descenders, b, d, f, h, k, l, t, and all capitals; g, j, p, q, y.
* b and d; p and q distinguished, not mirror images.
* Different forms for capital I, lowercase l and digit 1.
* Rounded g as in handwriting. Most liked rounded a, although perhaps some felt that it may be confused with o.
* Letter-spacing, e.g. r, n together rn should not look like m, (‘modern’ may scan as, or sound like, ‘modem’.)
And their summary on Comic Sans MS:
"It meets all dyslexic ‘likes’ except mirrored b and d."
Oddly, this monospace version has a different style 'a', instead of the 'hand-written' original, which is unfortunate. I understood that one of the benefits of the original comic sans was that each letter was designed exactly as kids learn to write (e.g. no strange flourishes on the bottom of 'g' or the top of 'a'), making its legibility popular in classrooms.
I originally had the so-called single-storey a by default, but it looked too confusing at coding text sizes. I even considered offering a "purist" version with that simpler a, but decided against it (too many options would confuse buyers). In my opinion, the simpler structure of a is better described as "writability" rather than legibility, and just because the new design does not follow the original does not mean it's bad. Whether it actually improved is a matter of opinion, but I believe in my decision in the context of coding.
Yeah, I agree, it makes sense to target the legibility at small sizes, given the expected use as a coding font - rather than a 500pt poster printout on a classroom wall!
I wonder, is there any tool that measures the similarity of letters / glyphs(?) in a font, specifically as a way to highlight ambiguous letters? That might be handy when designing or choosing a font for coding.
I just gave it a try... It has ligatures listed as a feature, but don't seem to be seeing the conversion of char sequences like I do in Fira Code. (E.g., in Vscode or VS with ligatures enabled, => turns into a "fat arrow", === turns into "a 3-bar equiv", etc.)
You could provide it as an OpenType variant (so buyers don't really even need to think about it at all unless they really want it, at which point they already have it).
I was actually taught to write the "double-storey" 'a' (but not the 'g', although I later taught myself to do it in order to reduce ambiguity), so I suspect it could largely be something regional. I was also taught to write serifs and slash zeros, which felt unnecessary at first but it definitely helps readability, especially with letters like 1Il.
I've also received comments that my writing looks like an actual font, so I tried finding one on the font identification sites, but none of them are really a close match; a good description of it would be "calligraphic version of Times New Roman".
I'll never forget the teacher who marked my exam question wrong because I wrote the result as a slashed zero and not a regular zero. When I asked the Prof, he told me that "a slashed zero is the empty symbol." This was not an exam about sets.
But I learned my lesson and never slashed my zeroes again.
There's one other difference that makes the lower case "a" stand out. The other characters have a slight rightward lean(there's probably a technical term for that). The lower case "a" is the opposite, and it really stands out.
People often forget one of the reasons Comic Sans is so popular is because of these properties, and cyclically the reason it's so hated is because people can't help but see it everywhere.
I think the Problem isn’t that it is everywhere, but it is a Font with a lot of character and people use it in all the inapropriate cases.
If you print a warning sign, the choice of Comic Sans (or Papyrus etc.) is incompatible with the message you wanna express. If you use Comic Sans for a childrens birthday invitation or well – a Comic – then your choice of font fits the message you are communicating.
Most Fonts that aren’t simple serif or sans-serif fonts add an additional message to the message you are conveying. Something neutral like an Helvetica/Arial/Calibri will not be perceived as conveying any additional context.
So fancy fonts essentially get into the way of your message if you don’t know what you are doing and this is the way Comic Sans got it’s reputation.
Additionally Comic Sans isn’t even that good of a Comic font to be honest..
My interpretation of the openbsd slides are that it acts as a sort of turing test.
If you are the sort that is excessively bothered by our use of the comic-sans typeface. Then perhaps you are not a good fit for our project.
More and more, I see the the continued use of cvs as sort of the same thing. It works and it weeds out people who care more about how something is done then what is done.
I developed a layer for CVS that provides directory structure versioning, symbolic links and execute permissions. Plus more: branches with merge tracking workflow for repeated merges, and a grab command that imports snapshots, identifying renamed/moved files, with symlink tracking.
That was 17 years ago.
People still using CVS in 2019 and not taking advantage of Meta-CVS are in a pretty special category.
I added the missing 1.1.98 tarball. Also, just tagged 1.2 which picks up some subsequent changes. (Last time anything was touched was 2014).
I wouldn't recommend CVS or SVN for any new deployments.
Even with Meta-CVS, CVS still sucks at the infrastructural level: the branching model and so on.
Meta-CVS has better support than Git for tracking changes in the directory structure, but that's not enough to offset the downside of being based on CVS.
> If you are the sort that is excessively bothered by our use of the comic-sans typeface. Then perhaps you are not a good fit for our project.
This is exactly what happened to me. I was thinking about installing OpenBSD, but then watched a presentation were Theo used Comic Sans and it put me off the whole project. The thing is: every OS has specific details turning me away from them: Linux, the BSDs, Windows, Android, MacOS.
Maybe I should stop using computers altogether, or maybe I should go with the flow and accept that everything and everyone in this world is mediocre and being a perfectionist is a fatal weakness.
The brightest and most productive people I've known can turn off perfectionism at will. Or more accurately, they accept mediocre input from others to find the diamond in the rough. They also accept mediocrity in the process; they don't care if they're brute forcing a part of the solution as long as they know that all of the pieces of the big picture are in place. In other words, they focus on the right thing.
Then, they turn perfectionism on when it comes to their output. They make sure their writing is impeccable and that communication is clear, precise, and efficient.
Unfocused perfectionism is a curse. It's a cause or a symptom of self-sabotage. Probably both.
I love OpenBSD's utterly passive aggressive use of comic sans. To adapt a popular metaphor, it is going out and painting the bikeshed flourescent pink and green tartan, whilst everyone else is still trapped in the meeting.
> one of the reasons Comic Sans is so popular is because of these properties
I doubt most people who use it do so because they know it will make it easier for people with dyslexia to read. My mother uses it all the time because she thinks its cute.
An Irish fiddler of some note once quipped, "What's the difference between a great tune and a hackneyed tune? About 20 years."
(Tunes come back around. They get so worn out, and "institutionalized" people stop actually playing them for fun. Then, if they fade back into obscurity, another generation can "discover" them again.)
Almost 20 years ago, we shipped a game called The Sims that used Comic Sans all throughout, that sold pretty well in spite of the font. Although maybe it's one reason some people are sick and tired of Comic Sans.
>Because of it's lighthearted nature, Comic Sans might be appropriate for design situations where humor or lack of seriousness is appropriate. One example of this is the simulation game The Sims, where Comic Sans was used for all in-game text. Materials appropriate for children might also benefit from the use of Comic Sans.
In case you can't stand to read Comic Sans with your own eyes, I also made an external screen scraping utility called Simplifier that reads Comic Sans text off the screen, and catalogs and recites the product descriptions with a speech synthesizer.
Demo of The Sims Transmogrifier, RugOMatic, ShowNTell, Simplifier and Slice City:
I recently dug up an early internal pre-release demo of it for "The Sims Steering Committee" from June 4 1998, that convinced EA not to cancel our project. It shows a very early version of the user interface, that was already using Comic Sans. (So did the Quick Start Guide.)
(Notice last word of the second paragraph of the Level 4 scenario description at 1:00! ;) Maybe the fact that it was written in Comic Sans enabled that little boo-boo to fly under the radar.)
>Microsoft Comic Chat installed a custom font, Comic Sans MS, that users could use in other applications and documents. In 1996 it was bundled with several other fonts in Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web project and subsequent versions of Microsoft Windows, leading to its notoriety among the internet.
>While Microsoft’s Comic Sans was first introduced in 1995 as part of a Windows 95 Plus Pack, the font was more likely cemented into many people’s minds for one or two reasons: 1) well-meaning, yet not-necessarily-design-savvy educators, and 2) being selected as the default font in a new internet chat application called Microsoft Comic Chat.
The problem is that fonts (like tunes) can carry their own context with them. But people are very sensitive to music and very insensitive to fonts.
E.g. it is more likely to get an funeral invitation in Comic Sans than to hear the musical equivalent of Comic Sans on a funeral (assuming both was selected by a relative).
People are extremely careless in their use of fonts and don’t think about the additional context their font choice carries to anybody reading. A bit like people who write with capslock on and don’t even think about how this changes how their message is perceived on the other end.
And Comic Sans is the cristalization of that phenomena, precisely because it is so recognizeable: nobody cares if you write all lowercase after all.
A good example of that is resumes. A friend thought his resume was good but could not understand why he got turned down every time he applied for a job.
I picked an appropriate font, aligned things a bit in the layout and made good use of a couple of white space. 5min job, minor tweaks, zero copy changes.
Suddenly he got loads of positive replies to his applications.
The target crowd was not one aware of typography nor design knowledge. The volume of applications was also entering the realm of statistically significant.
Almost every use of the font is misuse. In all the supposedly correct uses for Comic Sans, the correct thing is to actually write by hand to create the true personal touch.
People hate the faked personal touch of a canned font that imitates writing which looks the same everywhere, letter for letter, no matter who produces the writing.
There is a middle ground: you can turn your own handwriting into a font.
I agree with your point about the fake personal touch, but I think this effect is because comic sans is so ubiquitous. A great alternative handwritten font is Architect's Daughter, which is free for personal use
Comic Sans, or something closely similar, seems to be a preferred font for chord symbols and other indications in sheet music. I encounter it a lot, playing jazz. Maybe there's something about readability under adverse conditions, e.g., under low light, at a distance, with lots of distractions.
And like kindergarten material, the chord symbols in good music charts are printed big.
There have been a few (OpenDyslexic, Dyslexie, and others). However, to my knowledge no significant improvement has been shown over other, more common sans-serif fonts, despite several studies having been conducted.
They don't hate it because of a direct, well thought out opinion they've made. They just like to jump on the hate bandwagon because it's the thing to do.
Comic Sans is a good font if you want to make the thing look like it was made by a six year old on a computer. It is the printed equivalent of a lazy note written onto a crumbled sheet of paper by somebody who yet has to drink their first coffee of the day.
Comic Sans are the equivalent of office calendar quotes like: “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps”.
If this is the message you wanna get across, it is the perfect choice. For most other messages there are other more appropriate fonts (many of which can also be quite funky).
Comic Sans was my favourite font when I was 8 and made birthday invitations using it tho.
The font doesn't bring these feelings. You do. What if the problem is just that people have decided that it's ok to get upset about a font they don't like? Maybe people should try not to do that instead.
> more appropriate fonts
There are only two things that determine the appropriateness of a font:
1) Readability
2) The aesthetic desire of the person writing the message
Nobody ever says that Comic Sans isn't readable, generally readability is considered to be one of its virtues. People just think that the aesthetic desire of the reader should triumph over the aesthetic desire of the writer, and there they are wrong.
Nobody knows what font I was using when I typed this though. Better to use what is comfortable, or heck, more fun, than something boring because I'm supposed to be some kind of adult now.
Use a different font then. I know dyslexic people who have had dyslexic fonts installed on their school computers because they found it amazing. If a report says it's no use, try a different dyslexic font...or read a different report!
And the original comment was about Comic Sans being helpful, not about Dyslexie. So you can read it as "If Dyslexie shows no benefit, better use another font, like Comic Sans".
Hi, I'm the designer of Comic Code. I just wanted to join the discussion here, just because it looked fun. I know I released a Comic Sans variant, and I'm totally okay with the negative reaction; in fact it puts a big smile on my face. A world where everyone loves Comic Sans sounds wrong, doesn't it?.
I used to hate Comic Sans but it's still an interesting typeface that teaches you a lot about typography. Comic Sans can be a great choice depending on the context, and I want to share my personal favourite. When I went to a restaurant in Istanbul, they gave me menus in Turkish and English. The former was set in Comic Sans and the latter in Frutiger. The English menu looked so much like an office document and the Turkish one looked much more appetising (and I wished I could read Turkish). That was a genuine time when Comic Sans beat Frutiger.
Despite its quirky letterforms, it performs surprisingly well on screen. And I have seen people trying to use Comic Sans for coding too, most notably Simon Peyton Jones. Programming/coding is also a corner of typography where writing aspect plays a lot compared to others (e.g. user interface), so I found handwriting fonts quite fitting too. I think Comic Code also helps coding beginners who may be intimidated by the cold and mechanical visual of codes. I for one am easily bored while writing codes in regular sans serif. Coding environment is a very personal space and there is no need to look professional. I didn't need maximum clarity or efficiency in my coding typeface, but I wanted to have fun coding.
I think Comic Sans, for some people anyway, is something the internet told you to hate. I do see flaws in the typeface and I tried to improve it in my design, but I don't think you should be ashamed of liking Comic Sans. It's not even a bad typeface, and I have seen worse, many times. There is no bad typeface, only bad typography.
(That's not strictly true but generally the case for Comic Sans)
Sorry for the long post. If you have suggestions (e.g. what glyphs and ligatures added), I'm all ears.
I was expecting to laugh at how ugly it is, but it actually looks really nice! I bought the essentials pack to replace operator mono, which I've become bored with. Good job!
I actually... don't mind it. $15 is a bit much for me to pop on something I'm likely to spend some time giggling at (or maybe pranking some colleagues with... hmmm), but it really does look like the best of both worlds between comic sans and a monospace terminal font. Whatever that is. Anyways, well done!
Thanks! I have taken the idea very seriously and made sure it works as a workhorse coding font so that your purchase will not end up as a joke (it still may, that's up to your taste of course). There is Coding Essentials pack that gives you the usual four weights (Reg, Ita, Bol, BolIta) plus bonus weights.
Looks like a great font... curious if you might be willing to add the missing glyphs for CP437 (mostly missing block and line drawing characters)... would love to use this as a web terminal font option.
Is there anywhere except MyFonts to buy a license? The website is incredibly frustrating, it takes upwards of 20 seconds to do anything, and it's not clear to me how I can actually check out.
I still can't get the checkout page to actually appear, it just waits forever (but there's no loading spinner, so I guess it's some huge script running on every page load?)
P.S. It's nice to see a full set of basic Cyrillic and Hellenic characters.
Thanks, in my humble opinion, the Cyrillic and Greek are actually better in Comic Code despite being monospaced. Unfortunately I am not allowed to sell the fonts elsewhere, so you may want to send a feedback to the website. I am sorry for the inconvenience.
I know the typeface looks childish, but that does not mean it was made poorly; I spent a lot of time making this typeface actually capable of serious business. Also you can easily find coding typefaces with higher price but with fewer characters and sometimes no italics. Besides, there is a smaller pack called Coding Essentials, so you do not need to buy the whole family (that wouldn't be so useful for coding anyway).
Just bought the Essentials package. $30 is a steal for something that I might use for 8+ hours per day. I can only imagine the amount of work and craftsmanship that you put into this, congrats!
There was once an “Ask HN: What Font do you use for Programming?”. Most folks chose mono-space standards. One guy said “Comic Sans - to remind me to be humble.” I like that sentiment and I hope that he will enjoy this font.
Honest answer: that's a bit like asking "why buy games when there are so many free games available?"
Modern fonts are vastly more elaborate pieces of software than what people tend to think they are [1], and you get what you pay for. If you just need 56 letters, get a free font. If you need full Unicode Latin support, with proper kerning between each of the thousands of possible pairs, with ligature substitution for hundreds of tuples, not just for one language but several, with compositional repositioning for languages that require it, and alternate glyphs based on initial, median, final, or isolated letter form, and so on and so forth, then dollars will get you what free cannot.
Everyone can make a motivational jpg, but you need to pay a skilled digital artist to create a unique well composed new work. In the same vein, anyone can make a font, but you'll need to pay a skilled typographer (or foundry) if you want a well designed, feature rich typeface.
Seconded. The company I work for is currently commissioning a custom family of fonts from a major digital type foundry... and it's a vast (and expensive) undertaking. Consider potentially important features like support for[1]:
font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums
For fonts with the support coded in, this variant means numbers in tables will line up in your font without outright switching to a monospace font. Beyond good glyph design, as the parent mentions, there's a lot of work to craft a professional modern font esp. the more of the Unicode language space it spans.
The fact of modern vector fonts being software is what makes most fonts fall under copyright law in the first place in the US. Generally, absent actual software in the font file, typefaces aren't copyrightable at all. Pure bitmaps of typefaces are pretty much free for everyone to use. But if you use a protected vector font to generate those bitmaps, then they become infringing. Color of bits and all that.
This is also a US-centric comment. Other jurisdictions have differing rules to cover fonts and typefaces. In the US, however, it is fully legal to lawfully acquire a physical font specimen, scan that font, and do what you wish with it.
It definitely is. Some of the best fonts are still paid. And there are only so many high-quality free-fonts. That said, I haven't personally purchased a font (or worked for a company that purchased a font) for several years.
I can't imagine who would pay for this particular font :/
In addition to the other replies, there's more to a font than the shapes of the letters. "You get what you pay for" correlates even more strongly with things like hinting (internal instructions of how to try to align with pixel edges) than it does with the immediately visible appearance of the letterforms.
That's not a consideration for everyone, admittedly, but an incredibly important one for those who _do_ have to take it into account.
Yeah, Fira Code is an excellent font, and it is something I have used in the past. PragmataPro looked prettier to my eyes so I bought it, that's all. In fact, it's linked as an alternative on that Github page.
The condensed look and lack of interlinear spacing of PPro are a nice bonus, not that there aren't other condensed fonts. I suppose for intl use PPro might be nice too since it has 9000+ glyphs, and the dev is still adding more.
I bought FF Kievit back in the day because it was the most beautiful thing I had ever saw. Now everything on the web is Proxima Nova and it is a boring, boring place.
I started my career as a graphic designer, and I studied typography from an early age (my parents are both retired graphic designers and worked in the pre-digital era when designers really had to know their stuff). With the exception of a few well known typefaces (roboto, open sans, probably less than five in all) those free fonts suck. The kerning is terrible, there are usually no variants, they don't anti-alias well at different sizes, the international support is non-existent, etc. There is an absolutely insane amount of detail work that goes into designing a font and only the most OCD designers can pull it off, and only with an enormous amount of effort. If you spend 6 months to a year developing a font, you should be paid for it. Since I do notice these things I don't mind paying $100 for a font that ticks all of the above boxes. I stare at my IDE all day, and I wouldn't use a shitty color scheme, so I wouldn't use a shitty font on top of it.
Same reason why a lot of people don't use things like material design. People want their designs to look good and stand out from the crowd - not have the same cookie cutter site as everything else.
The names are trademarks, so you can't copy them exactly, but you can use suggestive alternates. Palatino => Palatable, for example. TeX Gyre Pagella is a very nice version.
The code is copyrighted, so you can't copy the code exactly. But -- you can rasterize a font, print it, scan it, vectorize the output, add your own hints, and now have a clean re-implementation. The shapes of the letters are not copyrightable.
Case law on copyright for fonts is complicated, with fonts generally having less protection than other works. My impression is that Comic Code is no more derivative of Comic Sans than, say, Arial is of Helvetica.
Hi, the designer here. As for the font name, Microsoft owns "Comic Sans" but not "Comic" or "Sans" alone. And as already explained, fonts are copyrighted as software codes and a new one has to be made from scratch (except of course when you are the owner or permitted in license agreement). In terms of visual similarity, Comic Neue is much closer to Comic Sans but MS hasn't done anything with it. If that's fine, Comic Code surely would be too. In any case, I did speak with the MS guys prior to release, and they saw no issues with either trademark or copyright.
Why is Comic Sans so reviled? Is it because it is one of the few fonts you are able to name?
It's like the mainstream view that ET is the worst game of all time. It is bad, yes, but not even close to the worst game of all time. Not even the worst mainstream game of all time.
Stop font is far worse than Comic Sans, and that garbage was showing up all the time in the 90s well into the 2000s.
> Is it because it is one of the few fonts you are able to name?
More that people can name it and identify it. Plenty of people know what Arial is, and I'd imagine designers hate it far more, but most people can't distinguish it from Helvetica.
> Stop font is far worse than Comic Sans
Yeah, if the original San Francisco[1] had been made a TrueType font and become popular, it would be equally reviled.
You can turn the actual Comic Sans MS into a monospaced font using FongForge. I've made a short video about this back when [1]. You'll have to pause a lot, but the end result is pretty neat.
I totally understand that it seems expensive especially if you haven't bought fonts before. Designers are more willing to pay for fonts since fonts are their tools and money maker, but most people do not make a money's worth out of font purchase. If you are in an environment where you think font choices can improve your productivity, I do recommend you consider buying one. To talk about our side, serious typeface design requires years of experience, and people who buy fonts are much smaller in number, compared to film and music, which is also why fonts seem pricy. Look at MyFonts and you will see Comic Code is actually on the cheaper side. There are sometimes good fonts made open source, but the principle that we need to get paid still applies; for those projects, it's just that they were paid by other companies like Mozilla and Google, not users.
Here is an open source option of monospaced Comic Sans, which seems to be a passion project rather than a paid one. It's a single weight with very small character count. I mean no harm to her project, but it does make a case for what you get for free vs money.
https://github.com/shannpersand/comic-shanns
I wish that MyFonts has a better way to "test-drive" the font. When writing some small snippets of code, I wansn't exactly sure if it would work well.
Ended up purchasing it, and I must say, it's really fun to use! I find that it makes it easier to go from "focus mode" to "overview mode": it's very readable, but since it looks less blocky than most monospace fonts, I find it easier to navigate larger blocks of code.
I might not use it all the time, but this will keep me smiling for a while!
I wonder if machine learning could produce human looking comic book lettering? It seems like something it would be good at. Also, I bet it could produce human sounding drumming as well.
hilarious - this is the incarnation of a psuedo joke that will never die on the internet. remember the dog? this was his font. now it can be all your coding too LOL
Hi, the designer of the font here. This version has ligatures but OFF by default (it's called dlig feature, discretionary ligatures). A version of the same font that has ligatures ON by default will be released soon. I don't know ho many code editors support manual activation of OpenType features, so I advise you get that later version if you really want to use it. Sorry for the confusion from not releasing them at the same time.
To share my view on ligatures, there is a danger of making it hard to count letters and I see a lot of designs feeling too creative with the possibility. In my design, I wanted to have ligatures that are more easily countable (not all cases though), and try to find balance between the two camps.
At the bottom of the glyph listings it does show glyphs for a number of the major programming ligatures. Doesn't seem to be a full set, in at least because I don't see the "Powerline" PUA glyphs, but a good set of the more common ones at least.
You make sure all ligatures have widths that are integral multiples of the standard width.
If you’re strict, you make them the same width as the separate characters would be. If you’re less strict, you could, for example, have “⇒” or “½” be one character width, and not 2, respectively 3 (the latter probably would make you give up making a ligature for “1/2”)
Monoid also experimented with using ligatures for better kerning at some point, don't know if it still does that. I thought that was a neat idea, especially since that is kind-of-but-not-really what ligatures are for in the first place.
One particularly useful property, especially in the education sector, is that dyslexics typically find it decidedly easier to read. Comic Sans uses distinct shapes for each character, e.g. no 'p' rotated to be 'q', and a variety of different sizes, all of which help make it easier for dyslexics.
AIGA article on the subject: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/sad-but-true-comic-sans-might-j...
From a bit by the British Dyslexic Association: https://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/ Studies showed the following characteristics as being desired:
* Good ascenders and descenders, b, d, f, h, k, l, t, and all capitals; g, j, p, q, y. * b and d; p and q distinguished, not mirror images. * Different forms for capital I, lowercase l and digit 1. * Rounded g as in handwriting. Most liked rounded a, although perhaps some felt that it may be confused with o. * Letter-spacing, e.g. r, n together rn should not look like m, (‘modern’ may scan as, or sound like, ‘modem’.)
And their summary on Comic Sans MS: "It meets all dyslexic ‘likes’ except mirrored b and d."