Tamsyn 1.7b programming font review

Suraj N. Kurapati

10 December 2011

(programming, font, review, patch)

11 December 2011:

I sent this review to Scott Fial, the creator of Tamsyn, but from his reply, it seems unlikely that the changes I dislike would be reverted. So I took matters into my own hands and backported the l, y, and w characters from the previous 1.6 version using FontForge and xmbdfed:

Download these modified fonts to your ~/.fonts directory and run:

mkfontdir ~/.fonts
xset +fp ~/.fonts
xset fp rehash

Now, any new applications you launch will use these modified fonts in place of the default Tamsyn 8x15 fonts.

A new 1.7b version of Tamsyn, the best monospaced programming font in my opinion, was released yesterday containing tweaks to existing ASCII characters and additions to the Extended Latin character set.

I like the following changes to ASCII characters in the new version:

NUL - drawn as empty square; useful for programming
1 - underscore below makes it easier to recognize
S - more streamlined and similar to lowercase s
C - more roundness, hurray!
G - more roundness, hurray!
O - more roundness, hurray!
Q - more roundness, hurray!

I dislike the following changes because they detract from the distinct styling of Tamsyn; particularly the uniform roundness of its characters:

l - roundness is gone; it reminds me of Courier :(
y - less round; too different from the round g
w - roundness is gone; too sharp and jagged

I'm neutral about the following changes and will give them a chance:

t - small loss of roundness and more centered now
f - less round and the horizontal stroke is higher
j - less round in the descender stroke