The Monaco font with a bold variant
Monaco - Original
MonacoB
MonacoB2
My favorite fixed-width programming font is Monaco 10pts. I develop in IntelliJ on OSX which uses boldness as part of its syntax highlighting. Unfortunately Monaco doesn't include a bold variant. Initially I thought it would be easy to find a replacement font with a bold variant, but I was not happy with any of the replacements. Some replacements I looked at were: Consolas, Inconsolata, Droid Sans Mono and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.
I have created three fonts with different weights for the bold variant. You may be asking why I didn't use variants such as Semi-Bold or Extra-Bold. The reason for this is IntelliJ's (and I'm guessing other editors) syntax highlighting doesn't allow creating highlighting rules for font variants other than bold, italic.
- MonacoB - bold (20% transform)
- MonacoBSemi - bolder (30% transform)
- MonacoB2 - boldest (40% transform)
Monaco.dfont is the original font from OSX.
Drag-drop MonacoB/MonacoB.otf and MonacoB/MonacoB-Bold.otf into Font Book > User or double-click and select Install font from the dialog. Repeat the same for the MonacoB2 folder.
The new fonts were created by transforming height and width of each glyph, and modifying the font meta-data to allow it to be installed side-by-side with the system Monaco.
The font looks great on OSX - have not tested on Windows.
Hope you like it!