0xDECAFBAD

It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Why is my Monaco Borken?

Okay, what's wrong with this picture?





Each of those lines is from a terminal I have open, trying to find one of my monospace fonts that works correctly and I don't hate. My past favorite has been Monaco for the longest time, but recently (when, I can't quite remember) it seems that it likes to combine "l" and "/" into one symbol. So does Courier.



On the other hand, I have this font called Monaco CY which looks close enough to my favorite Monaco, until I discover that it mashes double dashes together.



This leaves me with only two monospace fonts on my ?PowerBook that don't mangle things (however minor) in the terminal. They are Courier New and Andale Mono, both of which I very much dislike.



So, though I've found one other person complain a bit about this, I can't seem to find any explanations why. Best I can figure is that I had to dump a slew of fonts onto my system recently in order to be able to do some client work, so maybe I clobbered an out-of-box version of my previously favored Monaco. But that doesn't make much sense, since I tried snagging a copy of Monaco from my girlfriend's iBook to no avail.



Anyone out there have a clue as to what this is?

shortname=font_borken

Archived Comments

  • Russ
    I'm nut ixectly soore-a vhet zee prublem is, boot I fuoond zee teetle-a su foonny thet I hed tu leefe-a a cumment leeke-a thees unyveys... :-)
  • Bob Lee
    Everyone has this problem. I personally use Monaco size 15 and have been reasonably happy with it. Go to the "Additional Resources" page on http://iterm.sourceforge.net/ for more information and other font suggestions.
  • Bob Schmorbin
    Check out ProFont http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/ I wasted several days looking for the perfect monospace replacement for Monaco until I found ProFont, and I've never looked back. Thankfully there's a Windoze version too.
  • dsandler
    I'll put in my vote for ProFont. I used it for all my code in classic Mac OS; I now use it in Terminal.app (neatly side-stepping the Monaco issues) and on the Windows machines I'm forced to use during the day.
  • Tim
    I'd suggest grabbing Bitstream Vera, the free font Bitstream released to the Linux community. I use Vera Mono exclusively now and love it.
  • John Saxton
    This exact thing happened to me, and I tracked it down to a particular version/copy of Monaco that was behaving badly. I don't remember if I had done this myself or if some errant installer had foisted this upon me, but I had Monaco 3.5 from Mac OS 9.2.2 installed in my account's font folder (~/Library/Fonts), and it was overriding all other copies of Monaco on the system, even Monaco 4.0d3, which was in /System/Library/Fonts/Monaco.dfont. I removed that "bad" copy of Monaco 3.5 from my account's Fonts folder, and then quit and re-launched the apps that had been using it, and that cleared everything up. BTW, in the process of figuring this out, I went and got Apple's free OS X font tools from here: http://developer.apple.com/fonts/OSXTools.html (here's hoping that URL doesn't get stripped by the comments system) ...and then used "ftxinstalledfonts -rlf" to see what all fonts and versions I had installed on my system, and what their precendence was. Hope this helps, -John