A monospace font, created by programmers, for programmers.

MonteCarlo is a bitmap font suitable for code editors. All the characters have the same width, which is ideal for alignment. It is loosely derived from the look of the Monaco screen font that was available on the old MacOS systems. Some changes have been made to make it easier to differentiate certain symbols.

There is a good site, with downloadable monospace fonts designed for programming, such as the ProFont bitmap font, but those fonts all had small issues that made them almost perfect, but not quite. So I decided to create a font that would suit my personal taste. I hope you will find it useful too. Feel free to download a copy of the font, and let me know if you have any comment or suggestions.
I would also need help making a PCF font for Linux, and maybe a hinted TrueType version to use on the Mac. If anyone has tools to do that, that would be appreciated (it seems that even though FreeType can display a .FON Windows font, neither the GTK-based GNOME apps nor the QT-based KDE apps will show the MonteCarlo font...)

A few specific design points:

1. MonteCarlo contains a regular face, and a bold face

This makes it suitable for code editors that use the bold attribute for syntax highlighting (if there is no hand-crafted bold face in a font, at least on Windows, the system synthesizes one by overlaying to each character a copy of itself shifted by one pixel, which of course won't be the same width).

Look at an example screenshot from a Java file in the Eclipse editor that uses the bold attribute for keywords

2. MonteCarlo has a soft 'A'

ProFont and other popular monospace fonts have a character 'A' that have a pointy top. I think it does not match the overall look of the font, so the MonteCarlo 'A' has a rounded top.

NOTE: this version of the font is not quite finished. There are some characters that I have not tested much yet (they don't really appear in code...), and the bold face still contains some regular (non-bold-ified) characters. Any help is welcome.

Download Windows .FON file

Download Cyrillic Windows .FON file (contributed by 'comrade')

Download X-Windows/Linux .PCF files (Medium and Bold in a tar file) (see this blog post for info on how to enable pixel fonts on Ubuntu)

Download X-Windows/Linux .BDF files (Medium and Bold in a tar file)

Download TrueType .TTF file (Works on Windows when the .FON file is not compatible (Medium and Bold in a zip file), contributed by Pete Gonzalez

Download Generic TrueType .TTF files (Medium and Bold in a zip file) contributed by Christian Neukirchen

Download MacOS .DFONT files (Medium and Bold in a zip file)

Other Variants:

Scott Fial has created a derivative of MonteCarlo, called fixed6x11, you can find it here

 

Copyright (c) 2004-2010 Gilles Boccon-Gibod