Nope, nope, and nope. Unless you are presenting code or some data in a tabular format, or require even spacing for some other reason, please don’t use a monospace font.
The Monospace Web
141–150 of 159 posts
Re: The Monospace Web
#142I'm on mobile right now, can't inspect how they did the web fonts. Is it JS-based, or they used something similar to this https://github.com/Y2Z/invisible-ink?
Re: The Monospace Web
#143Earlier 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…
I'm not sure what you're trying to say about TFA.
Where monospace was pragmatic for the typewriter era because of the limitations of the technology, proportional is the pragmatic _and default_ styling of the web.
Choosing monospace today for prose is an opinionated, and in my opinion suboptimal, choice.
Re: The Monospace Web
#144Very 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/
Nice. Interestingly, the JetBrains Mono OP uses has many opt-in OpenType feature variants that can make more like Fira Code that you use. Some highly opinionated changes I would personally do to like The Monospace Web more would be enabling more serif-y variants and less blockiness, i.e. something like: /* Character Variants settings for JetBrains Mono (All are off by default, left them here all for reference.) H/T h…
EDIT: disabling ligatures is possible through disabling Contextual Alternates (calt), neat! And it is also possible to keep them on and change only appearance of aforementioned equal sign sequences back to "normal", using ss19. Turns out all features are nicely documented at GH Wiki [1]:
calt – Contains all ligatures. Substitution for : between digits.
ss19 – Adds gaps in ≠ ≠= == ≡≡ ligatures.
Re: The Monospace Web
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm not sure what you're trying to say about TFA. Where monospace was pragmatic for the typewriter era because of the limitations of the technology, proportional is the pragmatic _and default_ styling of the web. Choosing monospace today for prose is an opinionated, and in my opinion suboptimal, choice.
For what I read, the limiting factor is how quickly and easily I can grok what they are trying to communicate, not how quickly and easily I may be able to apprehend the letterforms.
Sure, there are better typographical choices than monospace, but even bothering with that decision is like optimising a 2*x to an x(on the flip side: it doesn't matter how easy it is to read a sequence of words, or how beautiful they may be, if they don't communicate anything; the code analogy is that it doesn't matter how much faster a buggy change runs)
Does that make sense?
Re: The Monospace Web
#146 I built this page 'cause I like to use Emacs' EWW and Lynx from
terminal windows sometimes. It's sort of thematically related:
https://ohmeadhbh.github.io/bobcat/
Greycoder.com had the same idea at around the same time:
https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/
And this is the typeface I use for my xterms:
https://github.com/lalo/VT220-mod-font
Monospace is awesome. I love what Oskar has done here.Re: The Monospace Web
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
See sibling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41383534
For instance, in this very convo what matters is that we're talking past each other, and I think that'd likely happen regardless of whether our comments were in fixed or proportional fonts, regardless of what other typographical choices might be made.
Re: The Monospace Web
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kerning makes such a huge difference in proportional fonts. Proper kerning allows your brain process word shapes much faster.
I'm curious if there are studies for this? In particular, I always think back to how few people notice common ligatures in books that they are reading. To the point that I would generally be willing to wager decent money, thinking 90% odds, that any given friend/family I have has not noticed it in books that they are reading. Only indicator I have that someone is aware of them, is if they know any typography terms al…
I'm curious about this too. Is this just preference/taste and the way everyone does things, or is there evidence to back it up. What could a modern study look like? There are so many aspects like the font, size, width or how much fixed width spacing between chars, screen/page size, background color, type of content. And are there other metrics than reading speed? Like information retention, or psychological effects like do people feel positively or negatively about the content/topic/reading experience.
I found this https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/48753/does-the-use-of...
- > In Universal Principles of Design, the entry on legibility states: Proportionally spaced typefaces are preferred over monospaced.
- It's unclear if that book provides further evidence to this statement
- > One famous research on this is Beldie I. P., Pastoor S. & Schwarz E, 1983, “Fixed versus variable letter width for televised text”, Human Factors, 25, pp.273-277, where part of the results include: The reading time (Task 1) with the variable-matrix character design was 69.1 s on the average, and the mean reading time with the fixed-matrix character set was 73.3 s, t (8) = 2.76, p - I couldn't find a pdf of that one in particular. The difference seems small
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144929021014673...
- > Comic Sans MS, Arial and Times New Roman typefaces, regardless of size, were found to be more readable (as measured by a reading efficiency score) than Courier New.
- small sample size 27 children. also the children preferred comic sans... we could pick a cooler monospace font than courier new
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10209-015-0438-8
- > It was found that larger text and larger character spacings lead the participants with and without dyslexia to read significantly faster
- unclear if those were monospaced
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/20925173_Reading_wi...
> We compared the effects of fixed and variable (proportional) spacing on reading speeds and found variable pitch to yield better performance at medium and large character sizes and fixed pitch to be superior for character sizes approaching the acuity limit.
Re: The Monospace Web
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious if there are studies for this? In particular, I always think back to how few people notice common ligatures in books that they are reading. To the point that I would generally be willing to wager decent money, thinking 90% odds, that any given friend/family I have has not noticed it in books that they are reading. Only indicator I have that someone is aware of them, is if they know any typography terms al…
I'm curious about this too. Is this just preference/taste and the way everyone does things, or is there evidence to back it up. What could a modern study look like? There are so many aspects like the font, size, width or how much fixed width spacing between chars, screen/page size, background color, type of content. And are there other metrics than reading speed? Like information retention, or psychological effects l…
NN group might have some resources, like this related article about all-caps: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/glanceable-fonts/
Or maybe more resources here: https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/readability_and_accessibi...
People tend to apply results from proportional font studies to monospace fonts. I guess monospace text isn't popular enough to get its own studies.
We need more readability A/B tests in general.
Re: The Monospace Web
#150Monospace doesn't bother me. Is the hard line endings that bother me. Someone with their "retro" web site that, essentially, uses pre tags. You get a wall of text, in a small font on the phone, reader view doesn't work, and if you tilt is sideways, you're as likely to get scrollbars as not. Nowadays this is also my singular complaint with tech mailing lists. The hard line endings and rigid layout.
I was trying to read some RFCs on my phone, and a simple paragraph had me scrolling right and left constantly (or zooming out until I couldn't read the text).