Fonts

With the prevalence of Unicode, many systems render APL legibly out-of-the-box. However, for a uniform appearance, the font should be designed with APL in mind. This article lists some fonts that are suited for APL.

Monospace

Name (website)	Source (download)	Description	Sample
APL2 Unicode	IBM	Straight from IBM typewriter terminals with oblique letters.
APL385 Unicode	Adrian Smith	Inspired by Comic Sans Serif.
APL386 Unicode	GitHub	APL385 Unicode with fewer issues and more accented characters.
BQN386 Unicode	GitHub	Re-hinted APL386 Unicode with harmonised glyphs and support for BQN.
APLX Upright	MicroAPL	A monospaced grotesque font, reminiscent of Akzidenz-Grotesk.
Courier APL2 Unicode	IBM	The classic Courier typewriter font, extended with APL symbols.
DejaVu BQN Sans Mono	GitHub	DejaVu Sans Mono with support for BQN.
DejaVu Sans Mono	GitHub	Wide range of characters with original look and feel of Vera.
DejaVu Sans Mono Bront	GitHub	DejaVu Sans Mono tweaked to be better geared for programming.
DejaVu Sans Mono Nerd	AUR	DejaVu Sans Mono patched with a high number of extra glyphs.
Everson Mono	Evertype (shareware)	A simple font, quite legible at sizes as small as 4 points.
Fairfax	KreativeKorp	Regular/Bold/Italic 6×12 bitmap font supporting many characters.
Fairfax Serif		Serif 6×12 bitmap font supporting many characters.
Fairfax HD	KreativeKorp	Plotter-like font supporting many characters.
IBM 3270	GitHub	Modern version of a classic IBM terminal font.
Iosevka Anonymous Pro Style	GitHub	A slender, highly customisable monospace sans-serif and slab-serif typeface inspired by Pragmata Pro, M+ and PF DIN Mono. This list includes seven ready-made versions, but it is easy to build one's own version too. When compiling, it is possible to configure character variants with apl-form = 'enable' to prioritise harmonising APL glyphs.
Iosevka Fira Mono Style	GitHub
Iosevka Pragmata Pro Style	GitHub
Iosevka Source Code Pro Style	GitHub
Iosevka JetBrains Mono Style	GitHub
Iosevka IBM Plex Mono Style	GitHub
Iosevka Recursive Mono Style	GitHub
poultreMono	Codeberg	A 5×9 pixel font.
PragmataPro	(commercial)	A condensed font optimized for coding, mathematics and engineering.
SAX2	GitHub	Curly font with italic letters, based on Sharp APL for Unix.
SImPL	Vector	Courier-based, but thicker.
Unifont	Unifoundry	Low-resolution bitmap fall-back font

Proportional

Name (website)	Source (download)	Description	Sample
APL333	Adrian Smith	Proportionally spaced version of APL385 Unicode
Code2000	FontSpace	Wedge-serif pan-Unicode font.
Iosevka Aile	GitHub	Proportionally spaced version of Iosevka.
Iosevka Etoile	GitHub	Proportionally spaced slab-serif version of Iosevka.
Quivira	Website	Serif font supporting many symbols, similar to Garamond.
Segoe UI Symbol	(commercial)	Microsoft's humanist interface and corporate font.
Stix Two Math	GitHub	Serif font, broadly compatible with Times New Roman.
Symbola	UFAS (free for personal non-commercial use only)	Supporting many scripts and symbols, similar to Computer Modern.

The APL typeball

Historical anecdote

Using IBM's APL\360 required the use of the IBM 2741 or IBM 1050 printing terminal with an APL type ball. The APL2741 font is based directly on this type ball.

Changing font in Dyalog RIDE

Dyalog Ltd's cross-platform RIDE interface, which is the default GUI interface on all non-Windows platforms, does not expose a font setting. However, it is trivial to change font:

1. Open…
   • on Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Dyalog\Ride-4.4\resources\app\style\ride-base.css
   • on Linux: /opt/ride-4.4/resources/app/style/ride-base.css
2. Find the line that says src: url('./fonts/Apl385.woff') format('woff'), url('./fonts/Apl385.ttf') format('truetype');
3. Insert local('font name'), immediately after src:, for example src: local('SAX2'), url('./fonts/Apl385.woff') format('woff'), url('./fonts/Apl385.ttf') format('truetype');
4. Restart RIDE