Friday, March 26, 2010

Dina font for Visual Studio 2010

Updated: I've verified it works with VS2010 Release as well.
Thanks to the hard work of Erik Olofsson decoding the mystery of Embedded Bitmap Fonts I was able to convert one of my all time favorite programming fonts Dina into TTF usable by Visual Studio. The beauty of this technique is that it preserves the bitmap glyphs perfectly and the text rendering does not try to apply anti-aliasing or cleartype. See?

Visual Studio 2010
*bonus* I found that this font can also be used with any .NET application (WPF or Windows Forms) that normally can't handle raster fonts. Here's Dina used as the Grid font for SQL Server Management Studio


Download from my File Cabinet If anyone wants to re-host this file let me know and I'll update the link

21 comments:

Chris Rickard said...

My answer to the diff between this and http://www.geenat.com/?p=66 is long winded enough to warrant its own post.

Unknown said...

I just installed VS2010 and discovered that it's TTF only, and I can't live without my Dina! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Unknown said...

Hi Chris, I was wondering if you could re-host the file. 4share has removed it from their servers. Thanks!

Chris Rickard said...

Rehosted. People kept marking it as illegal software on 4shared. It's now hosted at Google Sites which is better anynow. No wait, less likely to get blocked by corporate firewalls.

Unknown said...

Yes! Thank you so much. This is my all time favourite font for coding in. It's so easy to read and perfect for those long nights.

Finally VS2010 will be perfect! Much love.

Thoughts on low latency, high volume trading systems said...

Didn't work for me. Can someone suggest which size should be used for the font? I've tried 8-12, all seems to be using Consolas instead...

Thanks in advance!
Charles

Chris Rickard said...

Thoughts: Valid Point sizes are 6, 7, and 8. Check to make sure you don't have a VS Zoom level set (other than 100% that is) as DinaTTF doesn't work it all

Jason P said...

Is it just me ... or did a recent MS update break this font? It was working for me last week - now it shows up blank in both Visual Studio and the Font preview windows.

Jason

Unknown said...

Can I make this work in Windows 7 command line? I'm having a bit of a struggle with it.

Chris Rickard said...

Jason: I haven't noticed any problems, however I haven't installed VS2010sp1. I had Win7 SP1 installed for about an hour but then uninstalled it when I discovered the packaged MDAC broke backwards compatability.

Many times Dina TTF won't show up in a preview because it only renders at specific font sizes. One thing to check in your code editor is to make sure your zoom level is set to 100%.

Chris Rickard said...

DrLaban: Both Dina (raster font) and Dina TTF are incompatible with the requirements needed to be used in the standard Windows console.

You may want to try Console2 (hosted on SourceForge). I use this with Dina font on all my PCs.

Unknown said...

@Chris: Alright, then I'll stop bashing my head against the Command line-wall and just leave it to its own destiny.
Console2 works splendidly well, thank you for the suggestion.

Unknown said...

You've made my day! Thank you so much! :)

Lei Hu said...

Thank you. Can't stand to look at any code not in Dina font!

Lee, Wai-Fung said...

Can you share your VS color scheme setting as well? Many thanks!

Chris Rickard said...

Lee, Wai-Fung here you go!
Themes.zipx

friedman said...

Hi!
I've tried to apply your solution to visual 2012 but it doesn't seem to work: it falls back to Courier New if I select your Dina TTF font. Does anybody have any idea how to use Dina in Visual 2012? Many thanks!

Zockinger said...

Hello,
this is totally awsome, the font doesn't get Anti-aliased or Cleartyped when used in a Windows Control, cool. I have been searching for something like this forever (for use with scintilla), any chance on a hint on how you achieved this?
Cheers,
Zoc

CaffeinePwrdAl said...

Don't know if anyone else has this problem (I live for this font btw) - with VS2015 Community I get only some parts of the text being rendered, I see code comments, some keywords, but all the other text isn't rendered.

Microsoft, always being bloody special :(

Chris Rickard said...

Dina TTF doesn't work with 2012+ as well as a lot of other applications. Nowadays I use CodingFontTobi at 12pt which works pretty well with most hosts. I mostly use it for things I want super small like output windows and grid results. For code editor and terminal I've been using Input (Mono) for the past couple years.

tsiros said...

Not even Unifont works in VS2015!