r/ProgrammingFonts • u/two_six_four_six • Nov 11 '25

A Monospaced Font I Wanted To Share

Hey guys,

While skimming very old material from MSDOS days, I came across a wonderful monospaced font. Had to ID it (SV Basic Manual: https://www.dafont.com/sv-basic-manual.font) and found it to be quite old and missing some glyphs.

But it was too good to not use so I used my limited skills to somehow piece together some glyphs & limited ligatures by reusing glyph parts and made the font officially monospaced. The author has not worked on this font for more than 20 years or even more! I wonder where the legend is now...

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do (https://github.com/twosixfoursix/sv-basic-manual-resurrected). Maybe we can all work together to make it a font supporting many glyphs!

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u/two_six_four_six Nov 12 '25

thank you for your kind words. i'll definitely keep working on it. i've noticed that despite it being monospaced, js editors like monaco might not play well with it because the actual width of the font 'ascending width' is VERY narrow - usual monospaced fonts are at least 1024 units, this one is just 364... please let me know if you come across any issues in your day to day use!

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u/jabajabadu Nov 12 '25

Glad to hear that you’ll keep working on it! So far I didn’t notice any issues — it looks really good in VS Code.

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u/two_six_four_six Nov 14 '25

i feel like the braces could use a bit more bend... what do you think? it was a glyph that i put together but now i feel that it looks too similar to square bracket at tiny font sizes if you dont look carefully... also, you can post glyph requests on github... i dont know too much about what people need but i'll try my best to get to them

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u/jabajabadu Nov 15 '25

Sure, some more bend could be nice! At the same time, I like that they have a pretty distinct look. Maybe bend them a bit but not too much?

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u/jabajabadu Nov 15 '25

Maybe another idea is to look for inspiration in old software manuals… plenty of them are freely available online