574103 - Choose and package a good-looking modern monotype font for the Console output

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(DevTools :: General, defect)

Description

[David Dahl :ddahl]

This will no doubt vary by platform.

I personally like the ttf font, Mencsh: http://robey.lag.net/2010/06/21/mensch-font.html

Comment 1

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

we will want to use the same fonts we deploy for bug 468169

Comment 2

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

really? Shouldn't we just settle on one of the chosen system fonts for console output? I don't think we're deploying a font anywhere else in the browser and don't see why we'd want to do that here.

Comment 3

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

Mensch does look like a slightly nicer Menlo.

Comment 4

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>really? Shouldn't we just settle on one of the chosen system fonts for console
>output? I don't think we're deploying a font anywhere else in the browser and
>don't see why we'd want to do that here.

XP doesn't have a decent fixed width font, so in particular it could pick up one.  But in general getting a font which is slightly better than the fonts available on the system is a nice way to give our UI a slight advantage.  People might not even be able to consciously say why they love the appearance of our console or view source so much at first (this was my reaction when first using Coda before I realized they had a better font).

Comment 5

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

I think Lucida Console is the usual go-to font on XP and it's reasonably-adequate.

That said, after thinking about it for a bit, shipping a decent monospaced font isn't a bad idea. Inconsolata or Consolas or Mensch or, …

Would we want to ship a different font depending on the platform?

Comment 6

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

I think we would want to be confident that the font we are shipping is better than any font the platform has.  Since different platforms have different fonts, I can imagine us shipping different things per platform (or perhaps just using a native font on some of the modern platforms).

I was just looking at inconsolata on windows 7 with cleartype (in Firefox) and it really didn't look that great.

Comment 7

[Philip Chee]

Also see Bug 489902 - video controls should prefer a specific font name.
Pinstripe:
> +    font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
Winstripe:
> +    font-family: Arial, sans-serif;

(Although roc seems to be rather partial to Zapfino)

Comment 8

[Kevin Dangoor]

Getting this on the polishing radar for the Console in Firefox 4.

An immediate term answer here might just be to select the best possible monospaced font for each platform. Actually packaging and shipping a font is a bigger deal, especially when it comes to ensuring that there's a good collection of glyphs in the font.

See bug 465633 for the discussion from Thunderbird which covers some of the options (both in terms of fonts to use on each platform and potential fonts to ship).

Comment 9

[David Dahl :ddahl]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Getting this on the polishing radar for the Console in Firefox 4.
> 
> An immediate term answer here might just be to select the best possible
> monospaced font for each platform. 

Indeed, this should be enough for now.

Comment 10

[Kevin Dangoor]

This is actually being done as part of the work for bug 599498 (the plan is to just use Thunderbird's list of best monospaced fonts that already ship with our supported platforms.

Comment 11

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

yes, I remember that bug. We're not actually shipping anything though. That'll just be taken care of with styling.