FantasqueSansMono

Fantasque Sans Mono

A programming font, designed with functionality in mind, and with some wibbly-wobbly handwriting-like fuzziness that makes it unassumingly cool. Download or see installation instructions.

Previously known as Cosmic Sans Neue Mono. It appeared that similar names were already in use for other fonts, and that people tended to extend their instinctive hatred of Comic Sans to this very font of mine (which of course can only be loved). Why the previous name? Here is my original explanation:

The name comes from my realization that at some point it looked like the mutant child of Comic Sans and Helvetica Neue. Hopefully it is not the case any more.

Inspirational sources include Inconsolata and Monaco. I have also been using Consolas a lot in my programming life, so it may have some points in common.

Weights, variants and glyph coverage

The font includes a bold version, with the same metrics as the regular one. Both versions include the same ranges of characters : latin letters, some accented glyphs (quite a lot), some greek letters, some arrows.

Please note that I have not tested all of the glyphs I have drawn (some letters have those two layers of crazy accents that I have never witnessed before), so it might look bad in some cases. Please report these problems: see next section.

It also features a good italic version, which I designed in a fashion similar to Consolas' italic version, with new glyph designs, not just an added slant.

Stylistic set(s)

ss01: nondescript k

No distractive lovely loop. Get the pre-activated version here or see the issue #67 for techniques to activate the stylistic set.

Author and license

Created by Jany Belluz <jany.belluz AT hotmail.fr>

Licensed under the SIL Open Font License (see LICENSE.txt).

Please send me an e-mail or report an issue on Github if you stumble upon bad design or rendering problems (with screen shot if possible), or if you need more characters, or if you want to compliment me (I love compliments).

Installation

You can download the latest version and install it by hand. In the NoLoopK variant, the looped lowercase k is replaced with a straight version. The LargeLineHeight variant is especially useful for users of accented capitals. For more info, see the CHANGELOG.

Automatic installation on macOS with homebrew:

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts #You only need to do this once for cask-fonts
brew install --cask font-fantasque-sans-mono

Instructions for other platforms might follow.

Building installable font files

The build process requires:

• FontForge with python scripting support,
• ttfautohint
• sfnt2woff (from the woff-tools package on Ubuntu)
• woff2_compress from the Google WOFF2 tools or woff2 package on Ubuntu

Run make. You should see green stuff and some "OK" messages.

If you are using Ubuntu, please note that the FontForge version in the default Ubuntu repositories is much outdated at the time of this writing, and that is known to have caused subtle problems. You are advised to install FontForge from this PPA (using sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fontforge/fontforge prior to the installation). Alternatively, you can always download the latest prebuilt release of these fonts.

make install will install the TTF fonts into your local .fonts/ directory and update the font cache. It comes in handy while modifying the font.

Webfonts

Each variant has a Webfonts/ folder which contains various font formats for use on the web, along with the matching CSS font declarations. To use them, you must combine in the same folder:

• a custom .css file that you can assemble from the *-decl.css fragments (you can only pick the styles that you need, e.g. normal and bold)
• the matching .svg, .woff, .woff2 files from Webfonts/
• the matching .ttf files from the TTF/ folder
• the matching .otf files from the OTF/ folder.

Versions

Check out the changelog.

Which font?

TL;DR

• Pick your font family and then select from the 'complete' directory.
  • If you are on Windows pick a font with the 'Windows Compatible' suffix.
    • This includes specific tweaks to ensure the font works on Windows, in particular monospace identification and font name length limitations
  • If you are limited to monospaced fonts (because of your terminal, etc) then pick a font with the 'Mono' suffix.
    • This denotes that the Nerd Font glyphs will be monospaced not necessarily that the entire font will be monospaced

Ligatures

By the Nerd Font policy, the variant with the 'Mono' suffix is not supposed to have any ligatures. Use the non-Mono variants to have ligatures.

Explanation

Once you narrow down your font choice of family (Droid Sans, Inconsolata, etc) and style (bold, italic, etc) you have 2 main choices:

Option 1: Download already patched font

• download an already patched font from the complete folder
  • This is most likely the one you want. It includes all of the glyphs from all of the glyph sets. Only caution here is that some fonts have glyphs in the same code point so to include everything some had to be moved to alternate code points.

Option 2: Patch your own font

• patch your own variations with the various options provided by the font patcher (see each font's readme for full list of combinations available)
  • This is the option you want if the font you use is not already included or you want maximum control of what's included
  • This contains a list of all permutations of the various glyphs. E.g. You want the font with only Octicons or you want the font with just Font Awesome and Devicons. The goal is to provide every combination possible in this folder.

For more information see: The FAQ

Variations (Combinations)

The combinations and total number of combinations are provided here for reference if you want to create your own variation of a patched Nerd Font.

Why aren't all variations included ?

Combinations are no longer included by default because of the large inflation in size it caused the Repository and the amount of time it takes to rebuild all of the combinations. This issue would exponentially get worse as the numbers of Fonts and Glyph Sets provided increase.