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by lucianp 4312 days ago
My favorite is Source Code Pro by Adobe [1]. I use it on Mac OS X and Ubuntu. On Windows I have to use Consolas, because SCP does not render well in gVim for Windows (at least not on my system).

Note that Source Code Pro does not have an Italic typeface yet. Italics are commonly used for source code comments and most editors will automatically emulate the shapes, often with poor results. Active development is currently being done in this direction [2].

[1]. http://dwabyick.github.io/Source-Code-Pro

[2]. https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro/issues/6

2 comments

Just a minor nitpick: you are probably referring to an oblique style, not italic. Italic style implies a calligraphic handwriting look-alike, and is way more common with serif typefaces. Oblique style is just glyphs tilted to right, and I think that's what you meant here. No offense intended, of course.
"No offense intended?" Even the system font selector uses "italic" ...
Yes, but CSS, for instance, uses 'oblique'. You can look up the definitions yourself if you don't trust me...
[2] was raised in 2012 and still in discussion. I have no idea how fonts are made. Why does it take 2+ years to make a font italic?
Because you need to come up with a design for the cursive variant and then draw all those glyphs.

So the time needed is probably shorter than the time spent on the regular variant, but only by a small factor, certainly not orders of magnitude.

The glyphs can look completely different in italic. http://www.fffranziska.com/#sec_italics And after drawing the glyphs, manually checking and adjusting the kerning between every pair of glyphs takes a lot of time too.
You are right. From reading the comments on the issue [2], this seems to be the reason why it takes so long. Although I have now idea of how fonts are made, I think the work needs to be done for all currently available weights (7 different weights).
Its not just in discussion, a person has been commissioned and working on it for quite a while. it was 2 days he push the latest version.