Tuesday, September 25, 2012

[Insert required 'May the...'] Source Code font ['be with you']. Source Code Pro font released by Adobe as open source

SourceForge - Adobe announces Source Code font

Today the Adobe Type team announced the release of their second open source type family, Source Code. This monospaced typeface is an adaptation of the open source type family released last month, Source Sans, which to date has been downloaded over 67,000 from SourceForge. All six weights of Source Code and the source files can be downloaded from the Open@Adobe portal on SourceForge.

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Adobe - Announcing Source Code Pro

"Following up on Source Sans

The public reception of the release of Source Sans Pro last month was very encouraging. My colleague, Ken Lunde, pointed out that this was not Adobe’s first open source font as Kenten Generic has been available for some time now. But I stand by my claim that it is Adobe’s first open source type family. Sorry, Ken. The blog post announcing the family’s release has been our most popular in the history of Typblography and the news was picked up by major tech media outlets such as Wired, Ars Technica, The Verge, &c. As of today, the fonts have been downloaded over 68,250 times from SourceForge.

One particularly surprising aspect of Source Sans’s release was the amount of interest generated by the teaser graphic of the monospaced version. It seemed that this generated about as much buzz as the fonts that we released. Brackets, the open source code editor created by Adobe, has just recently implemented the regular weight of Source Code into their project. Likewise, the font will be integrated into Adobe Edge Code, which was announced this morning at our Create the Web event in San Francisco. The complete family of six weights will also be available as part of our new Adobe Edge Web Fonts service, which was just announced this morning.

Why monospace?

As a font developer, I spend a good chunk of each day coding in a text editor and reading output messages from a terminal window, so I can appreciate the importance of a good monospaced font. Of course there is no technical limitation to using monospaced fonts when coding, but it is a very useful convention. When the Brackets team reached out to us on the Adobe type team, asking if we could develop a coding font for their open source application, we thought it made sense to adapt Source Sans, which I was working on at the time. Personally, I felt that I could use this opportunity to create a coding font that I would want to use myself. Given the existing family name, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to name the monospaced variant designed for coding applications Source Code.

Adapting the design

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SNAGHTML14a9aeb1

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Availability

Today I’m glad to announce that the complete Source Code family of six weights is ready for primetime and is available through the same channels as Source Sans. You can download the fonts and source files from the Open@Adobe portal on SourceForge. You can clone and fork the project on GitHub. You can also use the fonts on the web through Adobe Edge Web Fonts, Typekit, WebINK, and Google Web Fonts. Again I have to thank my colleagues on Adobe’s type team for all their invaluable help and support with this project: thank you Miguel Sousa, Frank Grießhammer, and Ernie March."

I'm not a font'y guy and Consolas is usually just fine for me, but I still thought this was interesting, and since it was free...

Here's the FontOnly zip's content;

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And a before and after in VS2012;

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I'm not just I like the lowercase "L" or the Eye of Mordor in the zero, but still sometimes change is good.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Another really nice font, which I personally find it cleaner (less curvy) than Consolas is DejaVu Sans Mono from here http://dejavu-fonts.org . It's open source too.