Fixed width fonts don’t play nice with non-Western character sets.
Recently was editing some code in Vim that included strings in Vietnamese. Ignoring the bit where code and strings shouldn’t be in the same file, the font should at least display properly.
Not good.
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, my default fixed width font for everything, did not work.
Playing around a bit, I found Courier New worked perfectly for English and Vietnamese.
Not wanting to have to swap fonts based on language, I tried out the other language I use a bit for work, Mandarin Chinese.
Nope.
So I’m now in the unfortunate situation of needing to pick a font for my programming editor based on the language of the strings mixed in with the code. Not cool.
My current fonts (on Windows) now look like:
- Bitstream Vera Sans Mono – English
- Courier New – English + Vietnamese
- NSimSun – English + Mandarin
Any suggestions on a good fixed width font with characters for other languages?