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Go: Free fonts for Go's emerging gui toolkit.
Nigel Tao, Chuck Bigelow and Rob Pike announce [golang.org]:
The experimental user interface toolkit being built at golang.org/x/exp/shiny [godoc.org] includes several text elements, but there is a problem with testing them: What font should be used? Answering this question led us to today's announcement, the release of a family of high-quality WGL4 [wikipedia.org] TrueType fonts, created by the Bigelow & Holmes [typepad.com] type foundry specifically for the Go project [golang.org].
The font family, called Go (naturally), includes proportional- and fixed-width faces in normal, bold, and italic renderings.
[...]
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Go fonts is their license: They are licensed under the same open source license as the rest of the Go project's software, an unusually free arrangement for a high-quality font set.
The new face is similar to B&H's popular Lucida [wikipedia.org] Bright & Sans typeface variants but with many adjustments for source code readability:
The Go fonts conform to the [DIN] 1450 standard by carefully differentiating zero from capital O; numeral 1 from capital I (eye) and lowercase l (ell); numeral 5 from capital S; and numeral 8 from capital B.
While the decision to package a default font with a GUI kit is sure to raise a few eyebrows, the choice of Bigelow & Holmes should come as no surprise to those familiar with the Go team's previous work, Plan 9, and it's font offering.
