Taking an idea from Use the Best Available Ampersand and a list of pre-installed fonts from the Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows, I present “The Ampersands of Linux”:

[ampersands in 28 fonts]

(HTML)

Please try to contain your excitement.

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Sixteen comments here (latest comments)

  1. Clearly Linux’s Fancy Ampersand Factor (FAF) is lower than that of other operating systems. A sad state of affairs, to be sure.

    — Brad Fults #

  2. Really, it’s the “Ampersands of Free TrueType”

    It would have been better (lulzier) had you not left out Xwindows gems like 8×13 and bitmap ‘Helvetica’ (much less the corefonts overlap).

    — Fred Blasdel #

  3. The antialiasing is painful.

    — David #

  4. Oops, somehow I dropped the italics while futzing with the styling. It’s fixed; these are all italic ampersands now.

    — Mark #

  5. Your finest post. Consider retiring at your peak.

    — Jim #

  6. That’s a far cry better than Windows’s pretzel factory.

    — Lanny Heidbreder #

  7. Mark: none of those typefaces have more interesting ampersands in their italics?

    — Jacob Rus #

  8. @Jacob: this post now shows the italic versions of the ampersands. You can still see the normal versions if you like.

    — Mark #

  9. Ugh. Dejavu/Bitstream Sans is a pain. The guy from Simplebits just recommended the very same I though: <span class=”amp”>&</span>

    — Federico #

  10. Simple & Interesting

    thanks

    — Mean Dean #

  11. is that a fractal at the bottom?

    — intertubes cowboy #

  12. i noticed that you approve comments on the last post. i just wanted to say that i am really note a conservative as the last post would indicate. i am actually a liberal and i am a web programmer. for example, i know what lambda functions are, i know that jquery is a great javascript framework, i know about computational theory and that halting problem is interesting, so the previous post was purely facetious. knowing that, i think you could annotate the comments or something to fit it in — knowing that it is for comical purposes. thanks mark!

    — Anonymous #

  13. @David, the image seems to be a screen grab with sub-pixel hinting turned on, which is why the anti-aliasing will look bad on many monitors - it was rendered for Mark’s monitor.

    — Daniel #

  14. Sad that we only have one fancy ampersand in Linux, being that urw palladio l doesn’t have a fancy one in the regular version. I have urw chancery specified in my css framework, sencss, (Which I set out with the idea of offering good fonts for mac, windows and Linux.)

    For fancy ampersands in Linux that’s the only option for now, and it looks nice, but more options are always better.

    — Kilian Valkhof #

  15. For more ampersand porn, Smashing magazine lists ten styles from freely available fonts:
    http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/15/ampersands-with-attitude/

    — Assaf #

  16. No Liberation (the free fonts from Redhat) fonts?

    — Chris #

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