Best Fonts For Numeric Tables And Tuning

[Fred]

I've been playing around with fonts, sizes, bold/plain etc tonight while waiting for the wife to come home. I'm interested in the arty types amongst you coming forward with what you'd recommend. If you can bang up an example screen shot with a coloured table look, even if faked from oo spreadsheet, or something, that'd be cool.

State if it's cross platform or not, freely available, or not, etc. Whatever you know about it.

So far I like the following combos:

"Ariel" BOLD: 9, 10, 11, 12
"Ariel" PLAIN: 9, 12
"Courier New" BOLD: 8 (didn't try more...)

And dislike the following:

"Ariel" BOLD: 6, 7, 8, 14, 16, 18, 21
"Ariel" PLAIN: 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 21

Microsoft-only fonts such as Calibri and friends aren't welcome/useful here.

What I'm especially looking for is the smallest possible good looking font combo. Something that looks good fairly big would be nice, too.

Some examples:

Ariel BOLD 10 :



Courier New Bold 8 :



Ariel 12 BOLD:



Fred.

[sry_not4sale]

DejaVu Sans Mono
http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Main_Page

Ubuntu Mono
http://font.ubuntu.com/#charset-mono-regular

Both free to distribute I understand.

[sim]

Dina, who used to do this type of thing for a living, suggests Helvetica Compressed.

She used that font for the TV listing grids, back when they came in a weekly magazine.

Arial is very similar, but she insists it is not as good.

[ToxicGumbo]

From your examples, Fred, Arial 12 Bold is the best. No matter what you choose, black text on the deeper blues will be a pain the starfish to read.


-Jeff

[DeuceEFI]

I agree with ToxicGumbo, Arial 12 looks the best, but then again I haven't compared it to Helvetica Compressed, maybe post up a sample table in that font for us to look at.

[johntramp]

We probably don't have enough space to take advantage of this:


Two fonts I commonly use are Monaco:


and Terminus:

[sry_not4sale]

Terminus is nice!

[Fred]

Great feedback, guys! Thank you all very much! A little context:

FreeEMS tables are already BIG, and going to get bigger (and more flat/tall), and my use case is to put two of them on screen. I was looking at these on my main machine and realised that they need to be much smaller to fit TWO on a 1024 laptop side by side.

Another use case would be for one table at a time, using the whole screen to not look silly with tiny text.

I agree that Ariel 12 looks nice and that is why I borrowed the idea from another platform, but it doesn't look nice in other sizes I tested.

Sim, I believe Helvetica fonts are all proprietary? Correct me if I'm wrong. Even Ariel is, but you can install it on Linux from the mscorefonts packages which download it for you. I'm cool with something that can be installed like that "my tables look shit" - "install ms core fonts". Or something that I can bundle closed (or open), but if it's a licensed font, that's probably out of the question, at least for now.

Jeff, the blue/black/grey thing seems familiar. ;-) I think the saturation slider will take care of that for you or perhaps an auto text colour feature like in spreadsheets.

Thanks John for putting up pictures. The rest of you do know that



right? So post a few up yourselves and let's see what you're shouting about :-)

Can anyone show the best 6 7 or 8 point font, smaller = better, for this?

Fred.

[tpsretard]

i like the Terminus font also.
Fred, it might help if the borders between the cells were thinner.

[Fred]

Yeah, I've been thinking about how to do single line borders for smaller scales, though I like it on bigger scales, and they'll be thicker and other colours for various reasons, too.