Epiphyte Mono

Randy: I work for Epiphyte Corporation, which is designed from the ground up to work, not on its own, but as an element in a virtual corporation, kind of like—

Amy: I know what an epiphyte is.

— Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

The Epiphyte Mono font is a clear, easy-to-read font primarily intended for writing code. It is based on the Liberation Mono font and so is metrically compatible with Courier New. You can find the TTF files to install on your computer in the fonts/ directory, or you can download them in a Zip archive here.

This is my first foray into font design, and it would not be possible if not for the BirdFont font editor and all the work that others have put into Liberation Mono.

*Please note that while GitHub identifies this repository as hosting Brainf*** code, the *.bf files in the src/ directory are actually generated by the BirdFont font editor, and contain font information.*

Screenshots

Overview

Differences from Liberation Mono

Similar Characters

Code Examples

Building the Font

Building the fonts from the *.bf source files requires the following programs:

• BirdFont
• FontForge
• ttfautohint
• The fonttools Python library

You can build the fonts with the following steps:

1. Open each *.bf file in BirdFont and select from the menu: Import and Export > Export Fonts.
2. In some cases you may be able to simply use the *.ttf files generated by BirdFont, however it is recommended that you continue through these steps, especially if you want the font files to be Windows-compatible.
3. Open the *.ttf files generated by BirdFont in FontForge. Navigate to Element > Font Info. Select OS/2 from the sidebar in the pop-up window and go to the Panose tab. Set Proportion to Monospaced. Hit OK to close the pop-up window. Now select all glyphs with Ctrl-a. Navigate to Element > Validation > Find Problems.... Under the Random tab, check the box marked Bitmap/outline advance mismatch. Under the BB tab, check the box marked Check Advance. The text field next to that should already have 615 entered in it. Next, press OK, and glyphs will start appearing one at a time; for each of them, select Fix. Once this is done, generate *.ttf files by navigating to File > Generate Fonts....
4. Use the Python fonttools library to set the isFixedPitch field of the post table of each of the *.ttf files to 1. This can be accomplished for example with this script.
5. It remains to run ttfautohint on each of the four *.ttf files produced by FontForge. If the name of one is unhinted.ttf, run:

   $ ttfautohint unhinted.ttf hinted.ttf

   The new file hinted.ttf will be the hinted font file, which is ready to be installed.

This process is quite hack-y, and was found through a lot of trial and error (thanks to GitHub user flocc for help testing on Windows). If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to open an issue or send me an email at jdwinters96@gmail.com.