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The Monospace Web

owickstrom.github.io

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Re: The Monospace Web

#41

Post by aarreedd »

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?

Laravel does something similar. Each line of multi-line comments are exactly 3 characters shorter than the previous line.

https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/11.x/config/database...

Re: The Monospace Web

#42

Post by KronisLV »

rchaud wrote: post #20
daliusd wrote: post #14

It looks nice and refreshingly light.

The page loads a webfont (Jetbrains Mono) with 4 different weights, for a total payload of 725KB. Looking light and being light are 2 different things.

The problem is mostly with how fonts are packaged, because even if you serve WOFF and WOFF2 in addition to fallbacks like TTF, then the font will most likely include a whole bunch of symbols that you won’t actually display.

A way around this would be to split the font into multiple subsets based on unicode-range, like how Google Fonts do it: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans&display=s...

Sadly, I never quite figured out how to do it for arbitrary fonts easily, so for example I still serve comparatively large PT Sans, PT Serif and PT Mono fonts just because I like how they look. Maybe some day I’ll figure it out and will be able to automate converting all of the fonts I want.

Here’s something silly: you could probably put GNU Unifont on some page, the OpenType version of which is like 5 MB alone: https://unifoundry.com/unifont/

All that said, the JetBrains Mono font is a pleasure to look at on the site, as long as I’m not on a limited data cap.

Re: The Monospace Web

#43

Post by gsbcbdjfncnjd »

beautron wrote: post #36
dmd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GameFAQ was enough! FOUND IT! Thank you! https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...

Wow, this is wild! Maintaining perfect justification solely through word choice is... quite a writing constraint, lol. I don't think I've seen this done before.

I betcha it wasn’t perfectly through word choice alone as I can think of a few “tricks” that could be deployed undetectably.

Re: The Monospace Web

#44

Post by jtolmar »

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.)

Re: The Monospace Web

#45

Post by kristopolous »

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…

maybe there needs to be a gopher protocol refresh. some 2024 approach of the same idea.

Re: The Monospace Web

#46

Post by marcus_holmes »

whartung wrote: post #4

Monospace 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.

what's the thing with scroll bars? (curious)

Re: The Monospace Web

#47

Post by marcus_holmes »

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.

Re: The Monospace Web

#48

Post by Brajeshwar »

The web is beginning to come back home. There are going to be more and more pockets of satellite communities of the early web. It is becoming more and more interesting to be a traveler visiting different parts of the web again.

Re: The Monospace Web

#49

Post by Brajeshwar »

To the creator, can you please update your Github repository settings to include the final viewable URL. I would love people not to miss the final result if they stumble on the source.

btw, was reading the CSS, I smiled. Love it. :-)

Re: The Monospace Web

#50

Post by paradox460 »

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.)

Google may have, but kagi still shows it prominently

I actually got an angelfire link in my search results a few days ago. Was related to quake 2

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