A legible monospace font… the very typeface you’ve been trained to recognize since childhood
Seriously, though, Comic Sans was originally designed to be legible at the smallest possible font size, and the lack of hard lines makes it easier to read!
Yep, it shares a lot of characteristics with fonts like Dyslexie, but without some of the more irritating (but helpful) gravity additions that throw off non-dyslexic readers and/or just look odd.
Looks to me like it has a ligature that visually appears as two separate characters but are spaced to be close together. See the <= in the code examples on the page.
My original intention was to come here and proclaim that you're a heretic. Having looked at it for a moment, I think that you're onto something here...
This is cute~! I hated comic-sans when seeing it on lots of tacky corporate and school signs etc. but recently I ironically and then unironically fell in love with its whacky-ness, bold-ness and readability, (I use a Samsung phone, and used PT Mono on the S9, but then future phones blocked custom fonts, so I used one hack-ey Comic-Sans version since my mono ones are so underground no one developed a phone hack - now any font is possible again so I'm using the one below~ )
A few years ago my fav. font became PT Mono, from Google Fonts - cyrilic compatible, it has these angular edges, and swoopy circle curves, so cute <3
THEN there was this font printed on 2011 Pentax Q cameras and lenses that I loved, and couldn't find the original, but there was something very similar, STALKER1 and related similar fonts
You might like to try out Comic Code.
Which is a redone version of Comic Mono but more in the style of Comic Neue, while including Programming Ligatures and Powerline etc. (though no logos etc from Nerdfonts so for terminal use you might still need to patch it with the careful option)
I am using it and I like it a lot because it is so easy on the eyes like Lexend or Bookerly, but those two are not monospace.
One huge con though, because of the work the author did with redrawing all characters from scratch, it is a font that you have to pay for to use.
There were legitimate reasons from a design standpoint. It's badly balanced, the spacing is inconsistent...and it was everywhere.
Funny enough, I suspect what makes it a badly designed font might be why some people with dyslexia have an easier time reading with it. The badly balanced, poor spacing, probably made the letters in the font more distinguishable from one another.
If you (or anyone else that's interested) have the time, I think this article, "Why You Hate Comic Sans," goes over all of it pretty well.
I've heard that too - part of the issue with dyslexia is that it's easy to flip the letters around in your head, when none of the letters look the same, it makes it easier to read. Open Dyslexia is another one that does something similar.
I recently read a review of 1990s pop aesthetics, and it was probably intentional for reasons that resonate with us again. In the 90s, with the advent of omnipresent computers, organic, amateurish handwriting became really popular, and I think that's what comic sans is good at looking like.
I run my real thoughts through a filter of chatgpt with instructions to make it work appropriate, edit font to comic sans, then vary the grayscale of each individual character before I send out emails to people I hate.
That is true when reading on screens (especially low resolution ones), but serif fonts are thought of as better for print (they help the reader follow the longer lines of text).
I've heard it's easier for people with dyslexia to read comic sans than most traditional fonts. I have never been diagnosed, but I've long suspected I have it, and I have always loved comic sans and always thought it was very easy to read. I never understood why everyone hates it so much.
I do know about it, but thank you! Someone else might not have, so you mentioning it is great! I actually use the opendyslexic font for reading on my Kindle, and it's so much more visually appealing to me, and reading feels smoother.
Stumbled into this site while looking through other comments and apparently it was designed for the speech bubbles of a cartoon dog, not sure about the "legible at small sizes" claim - http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm
There was a YouTube programmer I used to watch called funfunfunction. He'd do a weekly video where he'd take a task, a framework, and a "handicap". One episode I remember someone suggested "comic sans lol" , which he set up, but it looked good
Yep, been using Comic Code for a while now - people hate me when they see me use it (and to be fair, outside of a terminal / IDE I wouldn't use regular Comic Sans either) but I suspect they've never actually sat down and glanced at it for a while.
I unironically really like Comic Mono despite not super being a fan of Comic Sans (not cos it looks bad, I think it's actually really nice looking, just overused)
I keep thinking about switching to this font. I use Fira Code atm, and I'd miss the ligatures, but this genuinely looks a a lot more readable
It's interesting that you added serifs and monospacing to a sans serif font. It's almost like comic sans but with all the things that make it comic sans removed.
It's really weird to me how Internet sometimes decide to hate on things just for the sake of it.
I wouldn't be using it myself, because I'm not a fan of hand-written style fonts. But, I see no problem with Comic Sans.
Comic Sans is just a poor choice for corporate signage and results in that "this is a Fortune 500 company and not a lemonade stand" reaction. Otherwise it's just another font
So despite the hate Comic Sans gets, squiggly fonts make it easier for dyslexics to read. Non-dyslexics can experience a similar effect by reading a book in serif then a non-serif font. I hate Comic Sans too lol but do what makes your life easier.
Comic sans is actually a great font for this reason. The only reason it gets hate is because it got over used twenty years ago. It's one of the most legible fonts, especially for small text, that comes with Windows.
I worked with someone who did this, working on a Flash & web front end, her Linux system didn't run Flash so I did all the testing. She worked in proportional spaced free software not-Comic-Sans, in IIRC a customized KATE editor.
the very typeface you’ve been trained to recognize since childhood
What does this mean? I feel like the one we learned from childhood would be Times New Roman since every teacher I had required that font.
I'm from Balkans, most of our textbooks all the way to highschool were written in some type of Comic Sans. In highschool only English and Math textbooks used Comic Sans font rest of them used Calibri.
Although I might be interested in using the OP suggestion, I will draw the line at paying for this unholy combination :D ..... But we really, good efforts here