Raph Levien: Inconsolata, an open monospaced font
Inconsolata is a monospace open font designed by Raph Levien.
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It is a high-quality font released under the Open Font License (OFL), the community-approved free license specifically designed for fonts and collaborative font design.
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This font really stands out compared to other fonts out there for the following reasons:
It’s an open font which comes with sources! The great thing about this font is that extended sources - not just the ttf - are made available by the designer: the Fontforge .sfd and the Spiro .plate sources are available on the upstream website and in the source package. A Type1 version of the font is also available.
It is a collaborative font project: you can freely use, study, modify, redistribute and/or sell the font under the terms of the OFL which means you are free to derive artwork from the font, to embed it in a pdf, to branch, extend and tweak the fonts to your liking. You can also send a patch to contribute to Raph’s project.
It is also the result of cutting-edge innovation. Raph has been using his own font design toolkit called spiro to design Inconsolata. Spiro is based on revolutionary curve technology implementing Euler spirals. The spiro toolkit also includes various optimisation scripts. See http://levien.com/spiro for all the details.