New Font

Wondering if anyone else has noticed this. Having upgraded to the latest viewer I was quite, mm how to put it.. disgruntled to find that the font used in script windows has changed. It's now some big, ugly font that takes up more space per character then before and just annoys me.

Anyone else see this or is this a my pc screwed up kinda thing?

I have seen other people complain about this.

Yes, it's a new font. The old font was missing a lot of characters so a new one was kind of needed. Unfortunately no one seemed to notice that it's a lot bigger at the default nominal 9 points than the old one was.

In your Second Life app folder, find skins/default/xui/en-us/fonts.xml and open with a text editor. Scroll to the bottom and you will see the font_size tags. Try setting the entry for Monospace to around 7.0 instead of the default 9.0, save, restart SL to see the changes. Lather, rinse, repeat until you find a size that works for you.

It would be nice if there was something in the SL interface for this, but there isn't. (There were debug settings for this but they no longer work, the sizes were moved from settings to the skins.)

Visual reference:

Old Font
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a373/Dyo_K/th_OldFont_001.jpg

and New Font
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a373/Dyo_K/th_NewFont_001.jpg

And thanks for the tip on how to change it!

Edit: Size 8.0 looks closer to the old size but it's still a different font and will bug me.

Yes, the font change irked me too as I spend a lot of time in the
scripting window. I've found that setting it to 7.2 makes
it about the same size as before, but as nice as the new font is, it's not
as nice as the previous font (at least I'm not used to it).

I would love to know the PERSON'S name who made this decision. lol
Bet they don't do much in-world scripting.

But here's what I did to make it exactly like before:

In the fonts directory I renamed DejaVuMonoSans.ttf to
DejaVuMonoSans.ttf.original

Then I made a copy of profontwindows.ttf (which was the font
used before) and named it DejaVuMonoSans.ttf.

I then edited the fonts.xml file that Viktoria mentions above,
and changed the size to 9.0.

Now the font in the script editing window is exactly as before.

- Infrared

Can you provide links to the actual images? Those are thumbnails.

Do I get a cooky?

Somebody already did this, but I've added some extra info:

Before: profontwindows.ttf set to 9.0 points



After: DejaVuSansMono.ttf set to 9.0 points



Besides the size difference, notice the font difference. For example the lower
case 'l' (L).

-iw

You almost got a cookie, but you blew out the width
of the thread! lol

-iw

Thanks, the new font is definitely a lot more readable. I like the DejaVu family quite a bit.

Still not going to upgrade to 1.23 just to get it.

DejaVu is OK.

But are you saying more readable because it's larger?

Or because of the design of the font?

- Infrared

I'm not sure it's completely possible to separate the two issues at these small point sizes, right at the ragged edge where anti-aliasing washes out. Personally I'd like to use Knuth's Computer Modern Typewriter or an anti-aliased Monaco (ProFont seems to be based on the smaller font sizes of the bitmapped Monaco), but Dejavu isn't a bad choice at all.

Someone else I know complained about this to me, but It never happened on my machine. I guess I'm lucky. Not that I would probably complain, bigger font is easier on these eyes of mine.

I find the design of the DejaVu font family to be better - particularly with the lower-case Ls. I can't count the number of times when I was learning scripting that I had confused the lower-case Ls with Ones.

I also don't have a problem with the new font size, either. It definitely makes the script easier to read and follow. I don't run SL in a tiny window, so the font size doesn't matter much to me. Larger text = easier to read code = fewer programming mistakes.

Silly question, I'm sure, but - if you're already going to be going in and editing the fonts.xml file, why go through the trouble of copying and renaming fonts? Simply change it in the XML file and be done with it.

You can change the font sizes by editing the fonts.xml file found in C:\Program Files\SecondLife\skins\default\xui\en-us Location may vary depending on the skin and language you use.

Look at the bottom of the file.

I only changed my Monospace font to 7.5, the rest I left alone.

I dig Ransom Note.

Ouch!

That would work.

-i

*hugs*

Thanks a bunch

Edit: I noticed that the font (profontwindows) was not existent in the fonts folder anymore I had to copy it from the old install I still had before I could use it. Changing the XML without copying the font over before hand wouldn't work. By that point, imo, may as well just rename the fonts.

Here's are some links on fonts for programming:

Some folks like Pragmata: http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm

Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer's Fonts : Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer's Fonts

A chart with samples for easy comparison: http://www.darinhiggins.com/CategoryView,category,Fonts.aspx

The author of the above chart suggest Consolas.

Programming Fonts: http://keithdevens.com/wiki/ProgrammerFonts

I've wanted a font that goes out of the way to make periods distinguishable from commas, regular parentheses distinguishable from curtly braces, and so on. Here's a font that takes that idea to an extreme: Oloron, available at: http://www.fontmenu.com/site/_program.html

There's a font called ti92pluspc that looks like it might be worth looking at but the url given for it is not longer valid. Anyone see a source for it?

If anyone knows of a suitable font that exaggerates the punctuation marks about two tenths as much as Oloron does I'd like to know and I'll bet some of the people with more impaired vision than mine could benefit as well.

Thank you, I looked at the XML file but had no idea if changing anything would do any good. I just started using Snowglobe again, and the font was one of the reasons I went back to 1.22 before. I'm editing scripts all the time, so I would go crazy if I had to use the new font! I also replaced the pie menus with the ones from 1.22. So now I can actually do stuff using the latest viewer and enjoy all the improvements. Thanks again!

Ok, this may seem like a silly question, but it may be related. I have used an old viewer with Nicholaz forever. Just to see what the current viewer is like, I downloaded it. While I had both SL and my browser open, I leaned forward and accidentally pressed one or several keys on my keyboard. (No idea which one/s.)

The first thing I noticed is that the text on my browser toolbars have different font - thinner, fainter and with almost a bit of a shadow on it. This carries through to the drop down menus for any of the selections such as Bookmarks.

I researched, reloaded my browser, went back to a past restore point (Windows XP), etc. and nothing worked. This morning I realized I was getting this same text within SL on my notecards, even those previously written.

The current viewer was deleted with the restore point but my strange question is: Would having installed the current viewer changed all the above? Or was it the pressing of some mystery keys on my keyboard. And if the latter is true...how did it manage to change text on my browser AND within SL?

I hope this makes sense and someone can help...I spent most of yesterday and last night trying to correct this.

Thank you in advance.

Just bumping this because this new font EVERYWHERE (even as I type this post) is driving me nuts and I'm hoping someone knows how to fix it. If it were just within SL, I'd figure it was because I installed the current viewer. But also having the same font now everywhere on my browsers is bizarre.