Fonts

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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.
APL385 Unicode Dyalog A fun, whimsical look, 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 Dyalog 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.
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.
Iosevka Pragmata Pro GitHub
Iosevka Source Code Pro GitHub
PragmataPro (commercial) A condensed font optimized for coding, math and engineering.
SAX2 GitHub Curly font with italic letters, based on Sharp APL for Unix.
SImPL Vector Courier-based, but thicker.

Proportional

Name
(website)
Source
(download)
Description Sample
APL333 GitHub Proportionally spaced version of APL385 Unicode
Code2000 FontSpace Quirk serif pan-Unicode font.
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.
 
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.

References

  1. Phil Chastney: APL fonts are different
APL development [edit]
Interface SessionTyping glyphs (on Linux) ∙ FontsText editors
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Sharing code Backwards compatibilityAPLcartAPLTreeAPL-CationDfns workspaceTatinCider
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Developers Timeline of corporationsAPL2000DyalogIBMIPSASTSC