13.7 Chosing the right font for source listings

In order to achive a plaesing source code presentation it is essential to chose the right font for the source code formatting. Computer programs are traditionally edited by using mono spaced fonts. Therefore it is desirable to use an monospaced font for printing as well, in order to conserve the visual layout which the source code had on the screen.

Because ProgDoc highlights certain parts of a listing by printing them with different faces, a monospaced font which comes with italic, bold and bold italic versions is recommanded. In this document the Letter Gothic 12 Pitch7 font family from Bitstream is used for source listings because it is narrower then Courier, the standard Postscript monospaced font family.

Unfortunately, for the computer modern typewriter family there are no bold and bold italic series available by default. There exists a bold version of the computer modern typewriter font (see [cmbtt]), but probably you will have to install it yourself.

Recently, with the release of Version 4.2 of XFree86, the free implementation of the X Windows System, the new, freely distributable monopsaced font family LuxiMono became available. It is a Type 1 encoded Postscript font which comes with bold, italic and bold italic versions. It can be downloaded from [LuxiMono].



Footnotes

... Pitch7
Letter Gothic 12 Pitch is a commercial font, but available on many CD ROMs bundled with printers or DTP systems (for example CorelDraw).
Volker Simonis 2003-03-05