Community
    • Login

    N++ default font contains visually ambiguous characters

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General Discussion
    2 Posts 2 Posters 747 Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • cowlinatorC
      cowlinator
      last edited by

      Yes, I understand the choice to use a monospaced font, but there are other monospaced fonts, and “Courier New” has a lower-case ell (l) and a numeral one (1) that are basically indistinguishable.
      See this example image.
      Why was this chosen as the default font, and can we use a different default font instead? Lucidia Console (a.k.a. Monaco), for example.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • PeterJonesP
        PeterJones
        last edited by PeterJones

        @cowlinator said:

        default font

        To quote myself from earlier today:

        The wonderful thing about tiggers… er, I mean, Notepad++, is that it’s highly configurable.

        If you don’t like a default, change the setting yourself. Style Configurator is your friend.

        Why was this chosen

        “Courier New” was probably chosen because it’s nearly universal on Windows machines, dating back as far as I can remember(*) in my font-based computing, and can be counted on to be there. And maybe there are people who prefer Courier New over Lucida Console, or whatever other “default” you might want to suggest.

        In the end, no default setting will make everyone happy for a given application, so the author picked some default and gave users the ability to change it. Since it’s configurable, the chances are pretty slim that the default will change.

        update: * “as far back”: a quick search found that Courier New was introduced as the system font in Windows 3.1 back in 1992. The first reference I can find to Lucida Console was Win 2000.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
        • First post
          Last post
        The Community of users of the Notepad++ text editor.
        Powered by NodeBB | Contributors