"Comic Sans Fixed", that rather sansless dream-o-mine

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/12/25 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/12/25/10108796.aspx

In honor of some principle or another that I find honorable, this entire blog is wrapped in a Comic Sans span!

I like Comic Sans MS.

There, I said it.

Prior to that I was one of those "There are only two fonts: Arial, and Arial 12pt" types, but the I started enjoying Comic Sans.

Ever since Athena (that terrible MS chat client that got me off the "unpaid MS product support" bandwagon I was on from the CompuServe MSAccess forum days like it was a straight shot of an ebola and hantavirus cocktail.

But I can't hate Athena completely, because she brought Comic Sans MS.

Hell, even after a Q&A with Gary Hustwit (the director of the film Helvetica), when asked what would the sequel be, he said that a sequel was unlikely, except maybe Comic Sans. He smiled as we all did, but I think everyone realized that public "Comic Sans spotting" would be as much fun as "Helvetica spotting", and maybe even moreso for the Comic Sans haters....

I even do my own Comic Sans spotting, like in The Company Meeting, the interesting science of Forensic Typography, and what happened after.

Now I realize you may not like it. You may be a disciple of Ban Comic Sans, or  an acolyte of Comic Sans Criminal.

If so, I feel sorry for you.

I mean, Comic Sans is a hero, like the "This video wasn't long enough, so we made it double-spaced" Font Conference College Humor video suggests:

Even if he sometimes shows up a little too late to actually, in fact, save the day, like this other College Humor video entitled Font Fight covers (which as a bonus finally settles the Helvetica vs. Arial issue, in a stunningly satisfying way):

But beyond that, I just like the font.

Now in blogs like

• The font width is broken? Well, fix it!
• The [non-]progress of the über-fixed width fonts 
• Sometimes everyone is happier when the game is Fixed (aka Consoling Consolas lovers),

 in addition to talking about the serious issue of trying to bring the notion of fixed width fonts to complex scripts and trying to get Consolas into the Console, I did bring up my fantasy font -- a fixed width version of Comic Sans:

Comic Sans Fixed

In fact in another blog (Look out for Font Rage) I shared my primitive notion of this font:

But in the end, as a going away present from my friend Carolyn Parsons, I finally have it.

You can see it here in Character Map:

though to be honest it looks the same here as regular Comic Sans does, mostly.

So here is a view that kind of shows the effect of it compared to its ancestor:

And maybe you can think about it in a code window.

Or look at (for example) this one from the Frosting project that was about encodings that no one ever used from ten years ago:

This is thoroughly amazing!

Now maybe this font isn't for you.

Actually, I am sure it isn't for you, since I have no permission to redistribute it! Though Simon did get a copy so it could conceivably ship one day if there were some Microsoft product or scenario designed to cater to people as batshit crazy weird as I am.

But I am pretty happy now in regard to my font situation.

In fact, the one thing that can make me happier (and which Sometimes everyone is happier when the game is Fixed (aka Consoling Consolas lovers) explains how to provide) is Comic Sans Fixed in the Console!

How senselesssansless is that? :-)

wrp on 25 Sep 2011 10:00 AM:

codemonkey on 25 Sep 2011 3:37 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 26 Sep 2011 9:18 AM:

wrp on 29 Sep 2011 7:55 PM:

referenced by

go to newer or older post, or back to index or month or day