Dina Programming Font in TTF format
Written on October 7th, 2008
For a long time now, Dina has been my favorite programming font. I find it crisp, clean and very readable for the amount of pixel space it takes up (wide bowls, no unnecessary serifs). It’s certainly a nice change from Courier New. In my opinion, a great programming font is just as important as any other tool in the programmers toolbox.
Unfortunately, Dina does have one big pitfall. It’s only available in the bitmap based .fon format, which is notorious for bad portability. Incompatible on anything but Windows, and even some Windows applications will not read this format (Sun’s Java Netbeans IDE for example does not support it).
After a long day of various hacks and adjustments, I was able to convert the Dina font to a working TTF format. You can now benefit from the fruits of my labor using the link below:
Here is a preview for your viewing pleasure:
For those interested, this is a screenshot from the Netbeans IDE. I have been recently giving Netbeans and Eclipse a test drive in preparation for my upcoming developments in Java.
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October 8th, 2008 at 4:30 am
Thank you very very much!
October 9th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Awesome! Thanks a lot!!
November 5th, 2008 at 9:45 am
This is a great little font. Many thanks for the TTF version.
November 6th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Hey, I was wondering what editor are you using? Mind telling me? I’m really interested. If it is SciTE could you contact me and send me the configuration file for this setup?
November 7th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Thank you!!!!
November 12th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
@crackpod:
The setup in the screenshot is Netbeans. Although i’m a huge fan of SciTE and use Notepad++ (based on SciTE) in all of my daily work. The Notepad++ colour scheme I use is called Ruby Blue, and can be found at http://3276.hu/project/port_of_ruby_blue.html.
It’s unfortunate that the syntax colour customization in Notepad++ is a pain to do; as I really like the colour scheme I whipped up in the post above.
Btw, I like your blog. Editra looks like an editor to check out.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:54 am
“Btw, I like your blog. Editra looks like an editor to check out.”, thanks! The same goes for you. I hope to see some comments from you soon.
CracKPod
November 13th, 2008 at 3:00 am
Sorry, for the “double-comment” but could you inform me about some good Java tutorials? (E-Mail)
You seem to now quite a lot about java.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
The official Java documentation is really good and generally up to date. It’s all here: http://java.sun.com/javase/reference/index.jsp
The big tutorial: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/
The API reference: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/
Good luck man!
January 28th, 2009 at 9:09 am
I love you man!
March 15th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Thank-you thank-you thank-you.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:47 am
…just THANK YOU!
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Thanks. I too love this font and can’t stand coding with out it.
I’m using Netbeans now - this is a godsend.
Thanks again!
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Thanks a lot, I already had this font but not in ttf format(which i prefer over others).
Now I have much more space to write, also a very clean font.
June 26th, 2009 at 1:25 am
Thanks. I love Dina and was looking for TTF format to use in my editor
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:46 am
Dina is great. Thank you.
November 6th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Thank you very much! It’s excellent!
January 2nd, 2010 at 8:43 am
Great post, thanks!!