Xicago Mono

About

A mono-spaced interpretation of the venerable “Chicago” font, the system font of the classic Mac OS.

Why?

These days I find many of the modern mono-spaced fonts, while functional, tend towards looking generic and similar to each other - lacking character. On the other hand, many font’s with character tend to fall into the novelty category, styled to look artistic but are impractical as a general purpose system-font.

Chicago has a distinctive look, with the heavy stems, light bars and unique design for glyphs giving it a lot of character.

This font aims to balance the classic aesthetic with the requirements of mono-spaced fonts on modern systems. Changes have been kept to those needed for the font to be used as a terminal font and for software development.

Approach

The original is proportional, so the glyphs have been redrawn to fit a single cell, close to the original’s medium width, with the wide characters (such as M & W) narrowed to fit.

Each glyph is drawn as strokes under an oval pen, twice as wide as it is tall, as the original’s stems are two pixels to its bars’ one. The “Bold” weight thickens the strokes, the “Italic” styles slant the glyphs and use cursive forms of some lower-case letters.

Glyphs for characters not found in the original (Greek & Cyrillic) have been created, following the Latin style.

Divergences

Noting some changes from the Chicago, mainly for readability.

  • Dotted zero to differentiate it from O.

  • Increase differentiation between O & D, using more rounded curves.

  • Increase differentiation between u & v, raising the lower curve to on the v to avoid confusion.

  • Serifs on the i & j, to increase their width, which better fits a mono-spaced font further differentiate them from l & 1.

  • Lower ~ & * to align vertically with - & + (better code readability).

Examples

Styles
Xicago Mono in the regular, bold, italic & bold italic styles, each with a pangram.
Alphabet
Glyphs which are easily confused, regular beside bold, then the ASCII letters & symbols.
Code (Python)
Python source, syntax highlighted.
Code (Rust)
Rust source, syntax highlighted.
Box Drawing
Tables in each line style, and a box within a box with a shadow.
Box Drawing Alignment Test
The box drawing alignment test, junctions, dashes, diagonals & block ramps.
Greek Alphabet
The Greek alphabet.
Greek Prose
The opening of Ithaca by C. P. Cavafy.
Cyrillic Alphabet
The Cyrillic alphabet.
Cyrillic Prose
The opening of I Remember a Wondrous Moment by A. S. Pushkin.

Character Coverage

In addition to ASCII, the font covers the following blocks & character sets.

  • Basic Latin (U+0000..007F).

  • Combining Diacritical Marks (U+0300..036F) (30%).

  • General Punctuation (U+2000..206F) (97%).

  • Superscripts and Subscripts (U+2070..209F).

  • Arrows (U+2190..21FF).

  • Mathematical Operators (U+2200..22FF).

  • Control Pictures (U+2400..243F).

  • Box Drawing (U+2500..257F).

  • Block Elements (U+2580..259F).

  • Geometric Shapes (U+25A0..25FF).

  • Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (U+2B00..2BFF) (8%).

  • Western European (ISO/IEC 8859-1) or Latin-1.

  • Eastern European (ISO/IEC 8859-2) or Latin-2.

  • South European (ISO/IEC 8859-3) or Latin-3.

  • North European (ISO/IEC 8859-4) or Latin-4.

  • Cyrillic (ISO/IEC 8859-5).

  • Greek (ISO/IEC 8859-7).

  • Turkish (ISO/IEC 8859-9) or Latin-5.

  • Nordic (ISO/IEC 8859-10) or Latin-6.

  • Baltic (ISO/IEC 8859-13) or Latin-7.

  • Celtic (ISO/IEC 8859-14) or Latin-8.

  • Western European with Euro (ISO/IEC 8859-15) or Latin-9.

  • South-Eastern European (ISO/IEC 8859-16) or Latin-10.

License

Released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, see LICENSE.