3 ms·
The guy is wound up and not thinking clearly. For nearly all my typing, I use a monospaced font because it makes getting vertical alignment, especially in tabl
by HilbertSpace 16y ago
The guy is wound up and not thinking clearly.
For nearly all my typing, I use a monospaced font because it makes getting vertical alignment, especially in tables, MUCH easier.
Essentially all my high quality word whacking goes through Knuth's TeX where his care with spacing is high beyond belief. There I include some TeX tricks to put a 'little' extra space after the end of a sentence, but to TeX a 'space' does not have a fixed width and gets adjusted along with all the rest of Knuth's complicated spacing algorithms.
For what a blog such as HN does with my text with two spaces after each sentence is just up to HN, and I haven't gone to the trouble to determine what.
Here's where the guy is wrong:
First, he is way too strong on running down monospaced fonts. Especially for programmers on HN, programming source code nearly always has to look much better in a monospaced font.
Second, and worse, the guy doesn't understand that in high quality typesetting the width of a space is not fixed. So, he is ranting about rubber.
Mostly all he is doing is ranting. Since he is writing for 'Slate', we have to suspect that he is all wound up, "full of sound and fury signifying nothing". Out brief candle. Nonsense. Detritus on the scrap heap of history nonsense. That's why I am always reluctant to read 'Slate': It's written for old maid high school English literature teachers who gush about Shaky Spire.
- ugh 16y agoProgrammers use monospaced fonts. (Undoubtedly for good reasons.) Nobody else does. (I’m actually no programmer and I like to use Letter Gothic – a monospaced font – for my personal written correspondence on paper. I don’t want my letters to look like they were sent from some corporation and the monospaced font makes the letters more personal without being childish. I would guess that I’m in a small minority, though.)
- 1337p337 16y agoNot just programmers. I've done some work for a lawyer, and a lot of filings and briefs use monospace fonts (wide margins and double-spacing, too). Most drafts and manuscripts are the same, to make things easier to mark up. I think it's also true of screenplays, but I've only had incidental contact with those. I'm sure plenty of other fields use monospace.
- apotheon 16y agoBasically, any field that requires any rigor tends to deal a lot in monospace fonts. Writing for Slate is not one of those fields.
- ugh 16y agoI see no connection between rigor and monospace fonts. Where do you see it?
- apotheon 16y agoFormatting. It's tougher to render (for instance) source code in a clear, easily understood fashion in a proportional font than in a monospace font. The same goes for a lot of mathematical and scientific writing, cases where red-pen editor's marks are needed, and so on.
- apotheon 16y agoWhat is "Shaky Spire"? edit: Oh, Shakespeare. Sorry, I should have gotten that.