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I've been facing an annoying problem for quite some years. Since Microsoft introduced the so called Cleartype tech around Vista, IE8 era. The bold display of Courier New font has been terrible. That is, it is very hard to visually tell bold and non-bold text apart.

It is not that I don't like Cleartype who makes many font display beautiful. You can see quite some comparison here: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/30040/Font-Survey-42-of-the-Best-Monospaced-Programming . That is, I do not intend to turn off Cleartype system wide.

Anyway, Cleartype seems to introduce the same problem to many monospaced(fixed-width) fonts like Courier New.

So, is there any good alternative to Courier New?

enter image description here enter image description here

BTW: Courier New on Mac OS X 10.6 Safari(with font ditherring) just looks great. enter image description here

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  • can we assume you tried and rejected all of the free fonts listed on that page already?
    – Jeremy W
    Mar 27, 2012 at 7:33

1 Answer 1

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This article provides examples of three fonts that are readable with ClearType enabled and the screenshots show bold styling does stand out to varying degrees.

  • Consolas

Consolas screenshot

  • Envy Code R

Envy Code R screenshot

  • Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

enter image description here

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    +1 for BitStream Vera Sans Mono! I recommend DejaVu Sans Mono, its more complete variant. :)
    – iglvzx
    Mar 27, 2012 at 8:20
  • Consolas is a good choice and the default on Visual Studios
    – surfasb
    Mar 27, 2012 at 12:56
  • Thank you. BitStream and DejaVu are much better than Courier New on Windows 7/XP.
    – Jimm Chen
    Mar 28, 2012 at 0:25

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