Menlo / Vera Sans Mono Comparison
June 15th, 2009As soon as I saw Menlo I knew it was going to be my new favorite programming font. Just a couple weeks ago I gave Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono a try, and it didn’t work for me, so I wondered what the difference was. You’ve probably seen the high resolution comparison already. But I don’t code in size 64 font; I program I code in size 11 font. Here’s an animation of some real code switching between Menlo and Vera Sans Mono.
Menlo is the one with the slash through the zero, while Vera Sans Mono has a dot in the zero. You can see that a lot of characters (“M”, “N”, “l”, “#”, and all the punctuation) look way too light and blurry in Vera Sans Mono, but look great in Menlo. The just look at how blurry that octothorp is in Vera Sans.
Update:
When Gruber asks, who can say no?
Here’s a comparison of Vera Sans Mon and Coda’s variant. Coda has the higher, longer underscores and the slightly lighter weight. I don’t really like how Coda is so thin that anti-aliasing kind of greys out the text. If you blow it up (or look at it with Digital Color Meter), then you’ll see that very few of the pixels are close to black.
And here is an image with all three. Vera Sans, Menlo, and Coda in that order. Menlo has the zero with the slash, so you can keep track of which is which. (I intentionally omitted a key from the image, because I wanted to focus on how the text changed without distraction.
You can download the gifs and open them in Preview if you want to page back and forth manually. It will give you each image as a separate page, and you can switch back and forth using the arrow keys. (This is also a great way to do an impromptu slideshow. Open a directory full of images, hit ⌘-A to select them all, and hit ⌘-O to open them in Preview.)
Tags: font, geekery, typography
June 15th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Have you tried Inconsolata? http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
I just love it :)
June 15th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Menlo looks very nice: I’ve recently switched to Inconsolata-DX as my main programming font – which is Inconsolata with straight single and double quotes (Inconsolata being a free monospaced font based on Microsoft’s Consolas). It looks really nice in MacVim and TextMate. I haven’t tried it in Eclipse yet. It’s living proof that monospaced doesn’t have to mean ugly.
Menlo certainly will be a nice sight and a great default for Terminal.app (etc.) on Snow Leopard.
June 15th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I moved from Monaco to Inconsolata a couple weeks ago. I was having eye-strain trouble and groping for something that might help. I tried all the popular, free, monospaced fonts and Inconsolata was my favorite. But when I started developing on Snow Leopard I fell instantly in love with Menlo.
June 15th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
One thing I really prefer about Panic’s version is that the underscore is hinted such that it remains 1 pixel aligned to the pixel grid. Anti-aliased horizontal lines are ugly.
June 15th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Another great way to do an impromptu slideshow is to open a directory full of images, hit command-A to select them all, then right-click or control-click and choose “Slideshow” :-) Includes onscreen controls and responds to keystrokes as well.
June 15th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I must say that I really like Menlo in these comparisons. I can’t wait to see it in action in Snow Leopard.
June 15th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Menlo looks awesome, I can’t wait to start playing with it in Snow Leopard. The only part of Vera Sans I prefer is the smaller asterisk; the one in Menlo looks too big to my eyes. Every other change in Menlo looks like an improvement to me.
June 15th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
This looks great, but at even smaller sizes (9pt, 6pt), “Andale Mono” seems to hold up very well by comparison, staying a bit lighter and more ‘open’ on the page where the Vera variants feel they’re starting to fill in too much (not to mention the smaller line height, allowing more lines on a page or more space between lines if you prefer). At 11 pt and up Andale Mono seems to feel more open and rounded as well.
June 15th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
I’m with Richard C here; that asterisk seems kinda big and low.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:58 am
Interesting comparison, thanks, but how is it that the Coda variant in your samples uses “standard” antialiasing, while the other two use subpixel hinting? This is clearly a disadvantage for Coda, makes its text look more blurry and greyed out. You can check it out by zooming hard on the animated GIFs.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:00 am
If you’re coding Objective-C then the new asterisk will clinch the deal. Otherwise, it’s still a great new version of Deja Vu Sans Mono (my coding favourite up to now)
June 16th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Over here Panic Sans looks almost identical to Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono. The main difference appears to be the underscore.
See for yourself: http://yfrog.com/14picture9ntwp
June 16th, 2009 at 10:00 am
I’ve tried them all:
Andale Mono Anonymous Anonymous Pro Consolas Courier Courier New Deja Vu Sans Mono Droid Sans Mono Custom Inconsolata Monaco MPW ProggyClean ProggySquare Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
Some of them are nice enough when antialiased, but I find the fuzziness fatiguing after about ten minutes, so I leave antialiasing off. I use 10pt typically, but might switch to 11pt if I could find a clean choice (the fonts that have bitmaps included for small sizes often skip 11pt).
I keep coming back to Monaco, but I have my fingers crossed for Menlo — hopefully the 11pt bitmaps are great, or the antialiasing isn’t super aggressive.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Is there a way for people without Snow Leopard to get Menlo? If it’s based on Bitstream Vera, isn’t it free for distribution?
June 16th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
CSchwang: I like your screenshot a lot more than mine. I took mine actually in Font Book in the preview window, on [not Leopard]. Are you on Leopard? Maybe Apple changed the antialiasing. Marco (above) suggests that for some reason Coda isn’t using sub-pixel antialiasing.
Asterisk haters: I’m having trouble sympathizing with you. I actually think the Vera Sans splat looks a little too high, almost like it’s superscripted. That doesn’t sit right with me. I like that it’s more grounded in Menlo.
Andrew: I tried them all too, and almost always went back to Monaco. I had the same “fuzziness” complaint you have with almost all of them. Monaco looks good and sharp both with antialiasing on and off. I only had a brief fling with Anonymous when my eyes were hurting. Menlo doesn’t look that different from Monaco, especially at smaller sizes. It’s a bit shorter and more compact. And as you can see, it’s a good bit less fuzzy than Vera Sans.
Bart: Menlo is Snow Leopard only for now (I might be in a grey area for even talking about it).
June 16th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
After trying many of these (incl. the new Anonymous Pro recently released)and after using DejaVu Sans Mono for quite some time, I can’t get out of Droid Sans Mono. It just feels right. I’ll have a look at Menlo hwen I switch to SL but I do not expect to change :)
June 18th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Yes, I’m on Leopard,
I made the screenshot in TextEdit, but I can’t see any difference in Font Book. Maybe Apple changed something about Sub-Pixel AA in [redacted]. They canceled the light and strong smoothing styles for example. Don’t know if this is the reason though, because your other screenshots clearly show Sub-Pixel AA at similar font size.
June 18th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Hi, I’m the guy who created the illustration on Typophile that was linked by Ars.Technica and John Gruber.
Once I discovered that Menlo was another fork of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, I had to find what kind of I just overlapped two screen caps from Font Book to quickly present the minor but noticable differences between DejaVu Sans Mono and Menlo– this is a far better representation, in my opinion!
I love Menlo, but my only gripe (and this goes across all variants of the Vera-based fonts) is that the leading (line-height) is just a bit too short and ought to be raised a little bit for further ease of reading.
November 19th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
,<>..] blog.expandrive.com is one another relavant source on this issue,<>..]