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 | Adrian Smith | 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. |
|
| APLX Upright | MicroAPL | 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. | |
| 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. |  |
| 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. |
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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 | Adrian Smith | Proportionally spaced version of APL385 Unicode |
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| Code2000 | FontSpace | Wedge-serif pan-Unicode font. |
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| Iosevka Aile | GitHub | Proportionally spaced version of Iosevka. |
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| Iosevka Etoile | GitHub | Proportionally spaced slab-serif version of Iosevka. |
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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
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