Archive for October 14, 2002

Monday, October 14, 2002

ProFont in Jaguar’s Terminal

One of the little things that’s been bugging me about Jaguar is that its Terminal application doesn’t display ProFont properly. It always draws the character sequence l/ as a blank. This is a real problem because ProFont is the best monospaced font in the known universe, and rivals Geneva and Espy Sans for the title of best screen font period. (Plus, it’s apparently the only one of the three that Core Graphics can draw properly; the others it spaces poorly.) Since I don’t use Terminal that much, Monaco—after its recent tuning—would be an acceptable alternative except that Jaguar’s Terminal gets its spacing all wrong. Luckily, Google pointed me to a page by Daniel Sandler that mentions the problem and offers a solution: use ProFontISOLatin1 in Jaguar’s Terminal. Many thanks to Daniel and his informant. Update: Core Graphics apps like Terminal and OmniOutliner draw ProFontISOLatin1’s hyphen character shorter than it should be. It looks fine in Mailsmith and iCab. The quest for the perfect Terminal font continues.