Anonymous Pro Minus

General Information and History

Anonymous Pro Minus is a family of four fixed-width fonts designed especially with coding in mind. Characters that could be mistaken for one another (O, 0, I, l, 1, etc.) have distinct shapes to make them easier to tell apart in the context of source code.

Anonymous Pro Minus also features an international, Unicode-based character set, with support for most Western and European Latin-based languages, Greek, and Cyrillic. It also includes special "box drawing" characters for those who need them.

Unlike Anonymous Pro (available separately), Anonymous Pro Minus does not include embedded bitmaps. This is to make the fonts more compatible with certain Mac OS programs, mainly older ones, that do not properly handle .ttf fonts containing bitmaps. For users of most Mac applications, and all Windows applications, Anonymous Pro will be a better choice.

Anonymous Pro is based on an earlier font, Anonymous™, which was my TrueType version of Anonymous 9, a freeware Macintosh bitmap font developed in the mid-'90s by Susan Lesch and David Lamkins. The bitmap version was intended as a more legible alternative to Monaco, the fixed-width Macintosh system font.

Anonymous Pro Minus differs from Anonymous™ and Anonymous 9 in a few key characters. While the earlier fonts had a one-story lowercase "a" like Monaco, Anonymous Pro features a two-story lowercase "a" to help distinguish it from the "o". In the earlier fonts, the slashed zero, designed to look different than the capital "O", goes the "wrong" way compared to most fonts that have this feature. Susan and David did this intentionally to distinguish it from the slashed capital "Ø" used in some languages. Some people thought this looked odd, so I put it the "right" way, and distinguish it from the "Ø" by keeping the slash inside the character.

Another significant change was to adjust the size of the characters in relation to the point size. Anonymous™ was approximately two sizes larger than comparable fonts at the same point size. This was in keeping with the old Monaco font, but can be annoying when switching between fonts. Anonymous Pro Minus has been adjusted so that it appears about the same size as comparable fonts set at the same point size. If you have been using Anonymous™, you will need to increase the point size to get the same appearance.

Finally, unlike Anonymous™, Anonymous Pro Minus is available in one universal TrueType format that will work on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. (If you're running a pre-OS X Mac, the new fonts are not compatible, but Anonymous™ will still work.)


Anonymous Pro Minus is distributed with the Open Font License (OFL).

USAGE NOTES

I do not recommend disabling antialiasing for Anonymous Pro Minus. The fonts simply don't have the kind of high-quality TrueType hints needed for them to display well at other sizes without antialiasing. If you wish prefer aliased display of fonts, its sister font family, Anonymous Pro, will be a better choice. Here are some OS-specific recommendations:

MacOS: 

Anonymous Pro Minus is recommended only for use with applications that are not compatible with Anonymous Pro. Antialiasing should be enabled for best results.

Windows: 

Anonymous Pro Minus is not recommended, unless ClearType is enabled. Otherwise, Windows users should use its sister font family, Anonymous Pro.

Linux:

I have no info about how well Anonymous Pro Minus displays on Linux systems. However, here are installation instructions, kindly provided by a Linux user:

Copy the *.ttf files to a font directory such as
~/.fonts or /usr/share/fonts/ttf. The exact location depends on your
distribution. See /etc/fonts/fonts.conf for details if unsure.

Run fc-cache using the command: 'sudo fc-cache -f'


OTHER INFORMATION

See "FONTLOG.txt" for the changelog, credits, etc.

Mark Simonson
October 17, 2009
Mark Simonson Studio LLC 
http://www.ms-studio.com 
mark@marksimonson.com

