by 16 comments on "Dina Programming Font"

Dina Programming Font

Download v2.92


Introduction

Dina is a monospace bitmap font, primarily aimed at programmers. It is relatively compact to allow a lot of code on screen, while (hopefully) clear enough to remain readable even at high resolutions.

I made this font after having tried all the free programming fonts I could find. Somehow there was some detail in each of them that meant I couldn't work with them in the long run.

The closest to perfect I found was the Proggy font, which the author kindly allows you to modify. So I started building this font using Proggy as the base, and with inspiration from Tobi, Fixedsys and some old DOS fonts I used to love.

This version is the result of intense tweaking and testing, and I am quite happy with it now.

Font Format

Dina is a monospace bitmap font in Windows FON file format. It is available as:

  • 6pt regular
  • 8pt regular, bold, italic, bold italic
  • 9pt regular, bold, italic, bold italic
  • 10pt regular, bold, italic, bold italic
  • All styles are the same width for proper alignment.

Motivation

In designing a programming font the following guidelines were followed:

  • Monospaced
  • Should be easy to distinguish between `j i l 1 I`
  • Should be easy to distinguish between `o O 0`
  • Operators should line up horizontally `- + * =`
  • Brackets should line up horizontally and vertically `< ( { [ ] } ) >`
  • Punctuation should be clear `., :; ' "`
  • Symbols used in programming languages should look right `& @ % $ #`
  • No other characters that look too similar `gqy z2Z s5S 8B CG6 DO uv`
  • Still has to be pleasant to read passages of text

Installation

Just copy the file 'Dina.fon' to your Windows font folder (C:WindowsFonts or similar), and it should show up in the font selection list of your favorite editor.

Depending on your monitor size and type, the 8pt or 9pt versions should be preferable up to at least 1280x1024 resolution. The 10pt version may be an option at higher resolutions.

License

The Dina font is free. You are welcome to use, distribute and modify it however you want, just don't use it for anything illegal or claim that you made it.

The Dina font is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this font.

Acknowledgements

A big thanks to Tristan Grimmer for his excellent Proggy fonts.

Thanks to mouser for testing.

  • Version 2.92
  • Downloads 24972
  • File Size 66.43 KB
  • File Count 1
  • Create Date December 13, 2017
  • Last update 2017-12-13 00:28:40
  • Last Updated January 8, 2018

16 Comments on "Dina Programming Font"


  2. Hi,

    I love using the Dina font because of its economical use of screen space and clarity at small sizes.

    I generally use it with tmux, however I’ve noticed that (presumably due to a recent change in tmux) the vertical bar character that is used to separate vertically split windows is missing – I just see an empty column. The character is 0xe2 (0342 oct, 226 dec). Would it be possible to have that added, please?

    Regards,
    Scott

    Reply

  5. I’m being confused some other UTF-8 related issues with the combination of software I’m using (Cygwin mintty, mosh, tmux, CentOS server), see https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/988.

    However generally speaking I’m finding problems with the line-drawing characters either not being centred in their character cells , sometimes to the point of being invisible, e.g. the ‘BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT VERTICAL’ character (http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richard/utf-8.cgi?input=e2+94+82&mode=bytes) being too far to the right at font size 10. Also a lot of the line drawing characters do not seem to meet each other in adjacent cells.

    Is this something that can be fixed in the font? Or is it more likely to be a problem with the terminal software displaying the font?

    I notice that font size 10 (which I use the most) is not actually listed amongst the choices in the Windows font chooser – does that mean it’s not technically a supported size for this font?

    I’ve taken a screen shot of some of the various combinations I’ve tried: http://galaxy4.net/misc/dina_line_drawing.png

    Regards,
    Scott

    Reply

  7. I really love this font. I don’t recall how I came across it, but it will always have a place in my console–and I’ll never forget the name, because my girlfriend’s name is Dina. Thank you for making it available for everyone to enjoy freely.

    Reply

  9. Thank you so much for the exquisite craftwork. I have loved this font for eight hours a day, every day, for years.

    This is a perfect small monospaced terminal font, that is much clearer than equivalently sized vector fonts.

    I use it on Linux, on 1080p displays. I don’t get HD displays because I still want good gaming frame rates with my mid-range graphics card. I’m curious how the benefits of this font would change on a HD display.

    Reply

  13. Thank you for the great font, it is really very convenient during coding. Standard fonts are not always convenient to use, there is always something missing and sometimes it even infuriates. In addition to programming, I design websites and often clients ask me to choose more unique and beautiful fonts. One of the clients asked me to install this font https://upfonts.com/thinking-of-betty-font/ to his website. I also liked it very much, so I started to offer it more often to new customers. Once again, thank you for putting everything in public access, I wish you success.

    Reply

  14. FYI, the BDF files are encoded in windows-1252 but claim to be ISO8859-1. I only realised today that Dina had a glyph for ‘œ’ after opening it in FontForge. Any chance you could at least fix the discrepancy, and at best provide Unicode-encoded BDF fonts?

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.