Surely we must be able to find one?
Can this be changed, or does it have more to do with the browsers?
Does anyone have suggestions, if it can?
menu.lst
menu.1st
> menu.lst
> menu.1st
is easy to see the difference in thunderbird 
–
palladium
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
You should be able to adjust it with your browser. Unless somebody forces a font.
In Linux I prefer the Dejavu Sans Mono font.
Or tell the posters you are replying to to cut and paste when following instructions.
I’m just wondering whether it’s possible to circumvent the issue, making browsers default to a font in which there’s a clear difference. It seems to come up a lot…
> I’m just wondering whether it’s possible to circumvent the issue, making
> browsers default to a font in which there’s a clear difference. It seems
> to come up a lot…
So does 0 and O.
In most fonts - so people are given to check.
Perhaps I phrased it wrongly. Our monospace font seems to have an unusual tendency to make an l look like a 1. I looked for the menu.1st file myself when I first came here, and I’ve seen a steady procession of people make the same mistake.
I guess it just seems to me that there’s little reason not to change it, if we can find a font that will clearly cause less headaches… (and assuming the software lets it be done)
… Just reread your post GofBorg, and I’m now not sure what you meant. Are you suggesting that we should change it, and find one with a dissimilar 0 and O while we’re at it?
> … Just reread your post GofBorg, and I’m now not sure what you meant.
> Are you suggesting that we should change it, and find one with a
> dissimilar 0 and O while we’re at it?
Some screens depending on the font, zero and the letter O are quite similar.
I’ve had license keys mailed to me where you just had to guess which was
which. ‘eyes’, ‘ells’ and ‘ones’ are prone to the problems you outlined as
well. I was just adding that ‘o’s’ and ‘zeros’ can be a problem also.
I don’t have any good suggestions but I’ve thought that menu.lst had a stupid extension. The .lst extension used to mean listing output from assemblers and compilers. menu.txt would have been better and stand a better chance of being guessed as a text file on DOS filesystems (GRUB is not Linux specific, there is even GRUB4DOS.) Or menu.cnf. And now there’s an even better reason to dislike it, people mistakenly read it as menu.first, and who can blame them?
On some Linux distros, there is a symbolic link from grub.cnf to menu.lst I think.
Well, this will all be academic presumably by 11.3, by when we have to assume grub2 will have landed.
But these and other errors will keep creeping in, and seem to me to be largely unnecessary. A monospace font really shouldn’t be trying to look pretty, it should be distinguishable, practical, and somewhat boring.
I’m assuming - I don’t know anything about how web pages work - we could relatively easily set it to something different, if we can find something better under the right license.
ETA -
And google seems to turn up lots of them…
From a cursory glance, I’m starting to see the problem. Most monospace font designers, it seems, look at their 'l’s and go: “Drat! I need to make that wider. I know - I’ll make it look like a 1.”
I like these;
Font Squirrel | Free Font Bitstream Vera Sans Mono by Bitstream
Font Squirrel | Free Font DejaVu Sans Mono by DejaVu Fonts
Font Squirrel | Free Font M+ 1m by M+ Fonts
These also don’t have stupid l disease, but are to my taste less eye-pleasing (and the first one has stupid 0 disease…);
Font Squirrel | Free Font Codename Coder Free 4F by 4th february
Font Squirrel | Free Font Envy Code R by Damien Guard
Confuseling wrote:
> I don’t know anything about how web pages work
i’m not an expert on anything, especially not this (so, perfecting and
correcting comments are expected/welcomed):
the page designer can specify a font to use…but, the browser
rendering engine can either use that font or not…
it can’t use a specific font which does not exist on your machine…so
most pages specify a “font family”…
still, if that family is not on your machine it can’t be rendered on
your screen (you won’t see it)…
and, most (all?) browsers i’ve used have a setting where you can
specify the rendering engine to disregard the web page designer’s font
selection, by selecting which font to use in its place…
that is done in firefox (3.0.14) by:
Menu > Edit > Preferences > Content (tab) > under the “Fonts & Colors”
section > click on “Advanced” > explore the possibilities
TIP: remember/write down/print screen what it was BEFORE you
explore/change…there are hundreds of thousands of combinations and
permutations (maybe millions, and you are unlikely to wander around
and successfully reinstate what you had before you began exploring)…
–
palladium
Yes, but this has nothing to do with me not liking the font, and everything to do with new users (normally running the default openSUSE du jour) not knowing whether they’re looking at '1’s or 'l’s.
So you might disagree with me that it’s a significant problem. Or you might disagree that it’s practicable to find a better font which is either already in the default install (and presumably hopefully has an analogue in Windows), or easy (fast) enough for the default system to download and use…
But the fact that you can override it doesn’t matter, any more than if the background of the forum made it hard to read text it would matter that you can turn off ‘display images’ or change the way it renders the text.
So if you pick a family not on the local machine, it displays nothing, or it defaults to something different? (I know I’ve seen websites not display or just display ‘boxes’ because they had a different character set, but that’s a way different from a font…)
And is there a list anywhere of fonts on a pristine openSUSE install, which we might compare against ones found normally on Windows boxes? Or where would you look in the SUSE filesystem?
I take your point - you can’t practically pick something exotic. But I refuse to believe there isn’t a better choice than this…
i’m bewildered that to see that you think i either agreed with you, or
not…or that my posting took a position in either direction…
–
palladium
On mine, ls -l gives:
LapTop:/boot/grub # ls -l men*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 nov 13 16:01 menu.1st -> /boot/grub/menu.lst
-rw------- 1 root root 1135 nov 18 08:42 menu.lst
-rw------- 1 root root 1510 nov 18 08:42 menu.lst.old
But this is a longtime knurpht’s hack ;). I do this as a habit on any system. Brought down phonecalls on this matter to almost zero.
There’s lots more where this could be done: libxine1 etc.
There’s a lot of monospace fonts that do have a difference. Between ones and els, between ooo’s and zeros.
Palladium: Not trying to read meanings where they aren’t.
You just seemed, in the context, to be implying that there are limitations to what could practically be chosen.
If you weren’t; well, there are anyway.
Which fonts contain which Unicode points? - openSUSE Forums this thread has some things.
This one probably being what you’re after Local Font List
In regards to boxes the way I see it that isn’t quite true, you can define the font in the page but if
- their browser overrides it.
- If not available it will drop back to the default.
But whilst I see some relation to character set it isn’t
no character set = box
It can also be that the font set doesn’t have the glyph. You have a fair few bits in the above link but would need someone that understands unicode rather than my crude stumbling.
Though I have to admit you do seem to of found one with Bitstream but … Bitstream Vera - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia it seems Linux only. As for a specific web font that does what you want and is compatible I leave you with the above link, has more than you can imagine I’m sure you could find one.
Edit
I also noticed it seems to be picking up bitstream where I surmise it isn’t being declared at all but is done by the user prefs for mono font.