Your favourite fonts choice and why? thread

[yangwao]

Hello, I’ve been using Obsidian for the past months and I’m genuinely interested in what fonts do you use?
Did you stick one’s which came with the theme?

I’m using Obisidan for my personal vault and also for the project, but what I miss to have is fonts that could fit needs and I’m curious about some curated choice of Obsidian community.

I’m looking in some font with ligatures which helps me a faster reading, writing and through glyphs it less noises my brain.

I’m using Firacode is VScode which is great tho, I’ve tried to load it to the Obsidian but turns out, it’s probably not so great for writing.

From there I searched for fonts with ligatures, found this thread Give ligatures a chance - DEV Community

Trying out now Iosevka Alie which should be great for writing.
There is also Monoid but it’s probably better for coding.

What’s your favourite font(s) choice and why?

[AtrusRiven]

The fonts you mentioned are coding fonts and Obsidian is not for coding. Monospaced fonts are not designed for readable texts (though some people use them as such). I like the default font of Obsidian very much: it’s clean and not so old-fashioned and deprecated as Arial. The italics could be better but that’s always the problem with sans-serif fonts.

Another good choice for me would be Open Sans (or Noto Sans).

[etienne]

I like Source Code Pro for monospace - I use it in code blocks and for everything in Editor mode.
I use Source Sans Pro for normal text out of Editor mode. To be honest I haven’t given the non-monospace font as much thought and just went with what went with Source Code Pro

[Chetachi]

I LOVE Karla for text/body. It’s a playful and unique font that I seriously wish I could mirror in handwriting (my handwriting is pretty illegible). I am also starting to use a font called Karmilla, a fork of Karla that adds support for other languages and includes some of the glyphs missing in Karla. Then my go-to for monospace would have to be Space Grotesk.

[charlesroper]

Big fan of Atkinson Hyperlegible here. The legibility really is great.

Download the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font | Braille Institute

There’s a great presentation from its designers here:

[charlesroper]

Some of my favourite monospace / coding fonts:

Cascadia Code ← What I use in my terminal

JetBrains Mono ← What I use in VS Code and other editors

Iosevka ← Fantastically comprehensive and space efficient

Anonymous Pro ← A classic, but no ligatures

For maximum fun, check out Nerd Fonts, which aggregates many of the popular open source fonts and adds a whole bunch of new glyphs and icons into them:

Nerd Fonts - Iconic font aggregator, glyphs/icons collection, & fonts...

Finally, https://www.programmingfonts.org/ is useful for discovering and trying out over 100 programming fonts.

[AblingerOscar]

For edit mode I use “JetBrains Mono” as I think it’s the cleanest monospaced font
For preview mode I go with “Montserrat” (body) and “Open Sans” (headers) as I just like how they look like together.

[mgmeyers]

After months of tweaking and testing, I found Lora to be my fav for every-day writing. I couldn’t really tell you why, other than it’s aesthetically pleasing and easy to read (to me, of course). Also, there’s something about using a serif font that makes my notes easier to scan.

[AtrusRiven]

The most important question: Does the font you want to use contain all characters you use in your field of research?

• Does the font include other writing systems, e.g.:
  • Greek ελληνική γλώσσα
  • Hebrew עברית
  • Arabic اَللُّغَةُ اَلْعَرَبِيَّة
  • Sanskrit संस्कृत
  • Japanese/Chinese 日本語/漢語
• Do you need diacritical marks, e.g. when working with transliterations, e.g.:
  • Prajñāpāramitā
  • Ḫirbet ez-Zerāqōn
  • Kuntillet ʿAǧrūd
  • zhǐguǎn dǎzuò
• Do you need mathematical or philosophical-logical characters?
  • (A ∧ B) ∨ ¬(A ∨ B) ↔ ¬(A ∧ B)
  • ∌≌≡⊆

By the way: Does anyone know how Obsidian handles fallback fonts?

[Chetachi]

Oh, Lora is SUCH a gorgeous font. Do you use it throughout the entire app, or just for the body?

[dustin]

For editing I use iA Writer Quattro GitHub - iaolo/iA-Fonts: Free variable writing fonts from iA it’s one of the reasons iA Writer is one of my favorite writing apps.

For preview, I have Fira Code for code blocks, San Francisco (apple system) for body text and Publico Headline for headings.

[mgmeyers]

Just for the body. I use -apple-system for everything else so obsidian blends in more with the os!

[PhucLe]

From the discussion on Cascadia’s github, it leads me to Recursive font, absolutely gorgeous.

[a_wue]

@PhucLe Thanks for the tip! Great font. Do you know how I can change text and headings in Obsidian to this font? I installed @mgmeyers Style Settings-plugin, entered as Base Font Recursive, sans-serif, but nothing changes. Any idea?

[Chetachi]

So Style Settings is a plugin for theme creators, plugin developers and css snippet makers to use to make their creations easily customizable. Are you using a particular theme that has support for Style Settings? It may be that their commenting wasn’t properly formatted or that something is overriding it.

[mgmeyers]

Hmm, strange. I downloaded and installed Recursive and it seems to work just fine using the default theme Style Settings config:

Do other fonts work for you?

[a_wue]

I use the ‘Red Graphite’ theme. Now I tried it with the standard theme (in the Help vault), but that also doesn’t work.

[a_wue]

I see in your picture that you simply have ‘Recursive’ in the textbox, and the font has changed. That doesn’t work for me. But when I look at the fonts list e.g. in Word (on Windows), there are many ‘Recursive’ fonts, like ‘Recursive Mn Csl St’, ‘Recursive Mn Lnr St’ etc. I don’t have a font with the name ‘Recursive’ alone. Could that be the problem? (Sorry for the maybe simple questions, but I don’t have experiences with font handling.) Thanks!

[mgmeyers]

Yeah, that could be it. I just installed this single variable font. But it may work differently on windows. Like you said, you may have to use one of those other font names

[incumbent]

I just love it. I spend a lot of time in terminals and I just prefer monospace type in general. I like Karla as well, someone mentioned that already.

I like Operator Mono as well. Especially Italic.