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.[1] 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. |
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| APL385 Unicode | Dyalog | A fun, whimsical look, inspired by Comic Sans Serif. |
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| APL386 Unicode | GitHub | APL385 Unicode with fewer issues and more accented characters. |
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| BQN386 Unicode | GitHub | Re-hinted APL386 Unicode with harmonised glyphs and support for BQN. |
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| APLX Upright | Dyalog | A monospaced grotesque font, reminiscent of Akzidenz-Grotesk. |
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| Courier APL2 Unicode | IBM | The classic Courier typewriter font, extended with APL symbols. |
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| DejaVu BQN Sans Mono | GitHub | DejaVu Sans Mono with support for BQN. |
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| DejaVu Sans Mono | GitHub | Wide range of characters with original look and feel of Vera. |
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| DejaVu Sans Mono Bront | GitHub | DejaVu Sans Mono tweaked to be better geared for programming. |
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| DejaVu Sans Mono Nerd | AUR | DejaVu Sans Mono patched with a high number of extra glyphs. | |
| 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 Envy Code R | GitHub | A slender monospace sans-serif and slab-serif typeface inspired by Pragmata Pro, M+ and PF DIN Mono. |
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| Iosevka Pragmata Pro | GitHub |
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| Iosevka Source Code Pro | GitHub |
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| PragmataPro | (commercial) | A condensed font optimized for coding, math and engineering. |
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| SAX2 | GitHub | Curly font with italic letters, based on Sharp APL for Unix. |
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| SImPL | Vector | Courier-based, but thicker. |
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Proportional
| Name (website) |
Source (download) |
Description | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|
| APL333 | GitHub | Proportionally spaced version of APL385 Unicode |
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| Code2000 | FontSpace | Quirk serif pan-Unicode font. |
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| Quivira | Website | Serif font supporting many symbols, similar to Garamond. |
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| Segoe UI Symbol | (commercial) | Microsoft's humanist interface and corporate font. |  |
| Stix Two Math | GitHub | Serif font, broadly compatible with Times New Roman. |
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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.
References
- ↑ Phil Chastney: APL fonts are different
| APL development [edit] | |
|---|---|
| Interface | Session ∙ Typing glyphs (on Linux) ∙ Fonts ∙ Text editors |
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| Sharing code | Backwards compatibility ∙ APLcart ∙ APLTree ∙ APL-Cation ∙ Dfns workspace ∙ Tatin ∙ Cider |
| Implementation | Resources ∙ Open-source ∙ Magic function ∙ Performance ∙ APL hardware |
| Developers | Timeline of corporations ∙ APL2000 ∙ Dyalog ∙ IBM ∙ IPSA ∙ STSC |