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by klageveen 2704 days ago
Hi, I'm the author of programmingfonts.org. Operator Mono certainly is pretty. I always loved consolas on Windows (honestly, it's the only thing that rendered properly on Win7). That said, I can only include fonts that are freely available, or where the owner of the font allows me to (in the case of Input Mono). I have tried for a few others, but haven't been so lucky there. So, no proprietary or otherwise commercial fonts. I do try to feature them on the blog though.
6 comments

Can't you have a "system fonts" section that uses the fonts already installed, so people can compare if they are running the respective OS?
Well, there is no way to get a list of installed fonts via the browser, but I have thought about adding an input so you can try installed fonts. I just don't have enough time to tackle all the ideas I have!
Check out B612 Mono

http://b612-font.com/

Have you looked at the licensing of the Lucida family of fonts (particularly Sans Typewriter and Console)? From a quick check it looks like just the old bitmap fonts are available for redistribution, and all the scalable varieties are proprietary, but I'm also seeing some contradictory information, so I'm not 100% certain on that. If allowed it would be a great addition to the site.
I have looked at it but have not found a suitable variant. All I find are commercial versions and “The fonts are not redistributable”. Honestly, I doubt bitmap versions are useful for most people.
Thanks very much for this, klageveen! I chose my default mono font the hard way and wish I'd known about your site back then.

Even so, comparing each font on your site affirmed my choice (Hack ftw). I'll be back, though, and will check out your blog in the mean time.

After going throw the list and trying out many of them in my editor, I also picked Hack. What a beautiful font, even in surprisingly small sizes.
It really is beautiful. It's a variant of Deja Vu, as I recall, and its hinting is perfect on my display. The feature I really needed, though, was good Unicode coverage, especially for math and logic symbols, and Hack has that spades.
It would be great if I can filter those fonts that support ligatures (Like Fira Code).
Some that have ligatures state it after the year they cameo out. For fonts that don't have ligatures on their own you could use something like Ligaturizer. This adds ligatures based on the Fira Code font to any other font. These ligatures are taken verbatim from Fira Code though, so some will not match perfectly with their non-ligature counterpart.
You can always use a static .svg or .png in place.
That's what I feature on the blog, but you'll notice the right-hand side of app.programmingfonts.org is interactive. That's kinda hard to do with static images ;)
Would it violate the ToS to create a simple sprite sheet out of a proprietary fixed-width font?
I don't think the author needs to go to such lengths just to support some proprietary fonts, specially considering that there are great free and open options.
Sure, but that's not really an answer to the question!
You seem quite interested in the answer, so surely you can spend the required time reading the ToS of the various fonts yourself.

Please come back and let us know what you find!

It probably would. Redistributing the font in another form is usually a violation. It’s also severely impractical ;)