Font usability for layout designers

Sometimes, while working in a text editor with my favorite monospace font, Lucida Console, I come across the fact that I cannot distinguish between an inextricable space from a regular one or a long dash from a hyphen. And the idea came to me to change the font so that I could see the differences between the characters.


Some applications allow you to show markup and somehow highlight special characters, but support for such things is not everywhere. Office packages are not the best place for typesetting, and the maximum that you can get useful from them is to highlight an inextricable gap.

Unfortunately, my searches on this subject on the Internet were unsuccessful. There was no standard designation for an inextricable space or dash, so it was decided to modify the font on its own. Of the free font modification programs, only FontForge was found .

Here is the result.

Lucida Console modified:


Times New Roman:


I can’t put Lucid out for licensing reasons, but there is a free Free Monospaced from the Ubuntu distribution.