Programmer Font. It's a fork of the Ume Plus Gothic Japanese font.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about making fonts. I simply took the Ume Plus Gothic font, loaded it up into FontForge, replaced the yen symbol with a backslash, did my best to change the name and ID of the font, and generated a new TTF.
This wonderful font is not my work!
Author: HORAI Wataru. License: This font is a free software. Unlimited permission is granted to use, copy, and distribute it, with or without modification, either commercially and noncommercially. THIS FONT IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY.
I live in Japan so I often need to use Japanese fonts. One of the nicer free Japanese fonts is the Ume Plus Gothic font. "Ume" is the font name, I believe "Plus" is a reference the addition of various symbols (see Font Lineage when I get a chance to research it) and "Gothic" means that it is the Japanese equivalent to a sans serif font (The classification of Japanese fonts is different than with Roman fonts). A serif, type written font would be called "Mincho".
Ume Plus Gothic has a fixed width font and I started using it for programming. It has many nice features as a programming font:
- 0 and O are easy to distinguish
- I, l, and 1 are also similarly easy to distinguish
- It is quite a narrow font so you can squeeze a few extra columns in
- It has a lot of veritcal space in the lower case letters which adds to readability for people like me who have poor vision.
The main drawback is that like all Japanese fonts, the backslash character is replaced with a yen character. Back in the old days this was important to allow you to easily type the yen character, but now we have Unicode to help us out and I think it's just a relic of past times. As a programmer font, having the yen symbol instead of backslash makes for very difficult reading.
The only thing I have done to this font is to replace the yen symbol with a backslash (accomplished by copying the forward slash and flipping it around the veritcal axis).
TBD. Tracing the free Japanese fonts back to their source is a little bit difficult since they seem to be maintained in a haphazard manner. I looked into this a while ago, but have since forgotten everything.