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The Monospace Web

owickstrom.github.io

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Re: The Monospace Web

#101

Post by agos »

16bytes wrote: post #17
pavlov wrote: post #10

The tight line spacing has a negative impact on readability. It’s hard to read long paragraphs of dense body text like this. But the tables and other character graphics require this tight leading. That’s the problem with using the same character grid for both graphics and text. It could be alleviated with a font that has a particularly low x-height (leaving more margin above and below the letters).

I thought you meant line width and was confused because it's in the generally accepted range (~70 characters). The line height, I agree, is too tight. 19.2px at 16px font size is too cramped at only 1.2x. Making it 24px is a big improvement. To my eye, however, a taller line height doesn't affect the tables and other character graphics. With some tweaks like this I think the monospace style comes across quite well. *…

turning on the debug mode shows that the text gets misaligned with the grid

Re: The Monospace Web

#102

Post by aversis_ »

wonger_ wrote: post #24

I've been keeping a list of monospace pages: https://wonger.dev/posts/monospace-dump#web . Currently have ~50. Spacing is a challenge. And you lose some legibility giving up proportional fonts. I think kerning in proportional fonts makes a big difference, letting your eyes recognize the shape of different letter groupings. Monospace text is fine if you avoid long-form text, like when it's structured and highlighted i…

Kerning makes such a huge difference in proportional fonts. Proper kerning allows your brain process word shapes much faster.

Re: The Monospace Web

#103

Post by creesch »

082349872349872 wrote: post #100
creesch wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> typewritten mss (some with handwritten greek) Not sure what you mean by that. Also, just because you spend a lot of time reading information formatted with monospaced fonts doesn't mean they are the best way for you to receive that information.

They may not be the theoretical best way, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you have something to say, I have nothing against improving its typography. If not, I'd argue for concentrating on spending effort finding, not a better typography, but better words. :: :: :: > Not sure what you mean by that. Older research papers were often written with typewriters, leaving blank spots on the page fo…

> They may not be the theoretical best way, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Sure, but this being the web and the font choice literally being one line of CSS it is not that hard to make things slightly better for everyone involved.

Even more so when a lot of the blogs I have in mind also try to appeal to a slightly broader audience than just the nerds used to monospaced fonts.

> Older research papers were often written with typewriters, leaving blank spots on the page for formulae,

Well, if you read them on paper it is a slightly different story. That is one of the main issues, fonts work differently on displays than on paper.

If you mean that you read these scanned papers, then I'd say that your argument mostly boils down to you being used to it by now. People can get used to a lot of things, to the point that they think they prefer it out of habit. That doesn't mean that they are actually better and can't be made better for other people starting out who are not used to these things.

Re: The Monospace Web

#104

Post by danbruc »

dmd wrote: post #29

Ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. A few years ago I ran across a ... I think a video game walkthrough? maybe? which was written to be read in monospace font, and it was full justified perfectly all the way through (thousands of lines!) SOLELY through word choice. Anyone know what I'm talking about and have a link?

Here is another ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in.

For years I wanted to make a Visual Studio [Code] extension that justifies comments as you type including hyphenation but accepting additional spaces as necessary. I never dared to really start beyond some research into relevant algorithms and libraries because it seems pretty complex. I tried to use things like fmt and par but mostly accepted that I can not have nicely formatted comments unless I do it manually, which I do sometimes but in general just costs to much time, especially as any small change often forces redoing several lines.

You have to deal with long identifiers that you preferably do not want to break across lines, [nested] lists, tables, code blocks, or ASCII art contained in comments, distinguish between hyphens as part of words and hyphens inserted by hyphenation, there might be structured comments like XML doc and Javadoc tags, ... When I saw Tom7's Badness 0, I considered throwing a LLM at the problem, but I think that this is not [yet] practical if you want it in real-time and without hallucinated comments.

Does something like this already exist or something to build on top that would make writing an extension not a year-long effort?

Re: The Monospace Web

#106

Post by red_trumpet »

jtolmar wrote: post #44
dmd wrote: post #29

Ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. A few years ago I ran across a ... I think a video game walkthrough? maybe? which was written to be read in monospace font, and it was full justified perfectly all the way through (thousands of lines!) SOLELY through word choice. Anyone know what I'm talking about and have a link?

That's called bricktext[0], it used to be a thing you'd occasionally see on usenet and places like GameFAQs. [0] http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html (Also wow Google has completely erased this concept from its search results.)

> Also wow Google has completely erased this concept from its search results

For me, it replaces the search with "brick text", but allows you to change to "bricktext" again, at which point it does give the catb.org result.

Re: The Monospace Web

#108

Post by panr »

Very nice! I like how bold and monolithic it looks (I just fell in love with that JetBrains Mono font). I did something similar (but fully based on HTML semantics) for people who like the style of my theme for Hugo, but don't want to use Hugo and all they need is a simple CSS file.

https://panr.github.io/terminal-css/

Re: The Monospace Web

#109

Post by boffinAudio »

klez wrote: post #85
sweeter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh my god that person wrote "The Art of Unix Programming" I binge read it last week and it was exceptional. What a world. These are the kind of people that I look up to and aspire to be like.

That person (Eric S. Raymond) also wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[0], a seminal work for the Open Source movement. [0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

See also, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", which I seem to recall was also monospace presented in the good ol' days ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...

Or maybe it was just a plain ol' textfile, I forget.

Re: The Monospace Web

#110

Post by pistoleer »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #47
usually wrote: post #16

It looks nice, and I'm glad that it's semantic and responsive, but the fundamental problem is that monospace just isn't great for body text. I've read blog posts on multiple sites with monospaced body text, it's okay, but proportional really is the way to go in my opinion.

I think I prefer monospaced. I certainly prefer the white-on-black colour scheme. I definitely prefer this to the "beautiful" pages that try to capture the feel of old print magazines.

I think any heavily stylized text (that includes terminalesque sites) takes extra cognitive effort to read. Sometimes it's best to just leave it plain, and have it be elegant through being easy to read.
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