[fonts] Good font for code presentations?

There's a couple of good questions regarding screen fonts for coding.

I'm putting together some Keynote presentations that will contain

  • code fragments

  • screen dumps of terminal windows

And the usual Courier display is looking a bit tired.

What are some good fonts for each of these? I'm especially interested in the terminal window dumps, to make sure they are legible. Or perhaps I can cut and paste the characters from the terminal window and apply some formatting to make it look screen-dumpish?

My main goal are

  • legible on screen and in printed outlines

  • the screen dump especially should be legible, but still identifiable as a screen dump

  • demonstrate I'm a person of visual taste and refinement, lol.

This question is related to fonts

The answer is


I'm personally very fond of Inconsolata


If you are doing a presentation, and you don't care about anything lining up, Verdana is a good choice.

If you are going to distribute your presentation, use a font that you know is on everyone's machine, since using something else is going to cause the machine to fall back to one of the common fonts (like Arial or Times) anyway.

If you do care about things lining up, and are not distributing the presentation, consider Consolas:

alt text

It is highly legible, reminiscent of Verdana, and is monospaced. The color choices are, of course, a matter of taste.


I use DejaVu Sans Mono at Size 16.

UPDATE : I have switched to Envy Code R for coding and Anonymous Pro for terminal


I prefer Consolas.


I like Calibri.


  • Lucida Console (good, but a little short)
  • Lucida Sans Typewriter (taller, smaller character set)
  • Andale Mono is very clear

But this has been answered here before.


Do you want people to focus on the content, and demonstrate that you're a person of taste and good sense? Stay with Courier. Don't innovate just because you can (otherwise, why not craft exquisite animations for every slide transition, with dancing letters...?).

Courier has several advantages:

  1. Excellent readability in low resolutions.
  2. Fixed width preserves indentation.
  3. Serifed fonts link letters, allowing people to understand words and identifiers as a whole (gestalt perception). Nonserifed fonts should only be used for headlines.
  4. Tried and true: people will immediately understand it's code.

If you want to dump point 4, at least choose an alternative that preserves points 1-3. Never allow form to trump function.