5 ms·
I'm down with the hacking aspect here, but why would I want to render comments in italics? Comments are often larger pieces of natural language, and there's a
by Athas 7y ago
I'm down with the hacking aspect here, but why would I want to render comments in italics? Comments are often larger pieces of natural language, and there's a reason we don't typeset our books in all-italics - it's harder to read.
- zokier 7y agoThere is also a reason why we don't typeset books in monospaced fonts, but oh well...
- laumars 7y agoYup, because it's cheaper (more words per line / fewer pages). You could argue it is easier to read (and better for the environment too) but it wasn't that long ago when fixed width was the norm (typewriters, dot-matrix printers, early micro-computers / mainframes, etc) and people read just fine.
- hibbelig 7y agoGiven that the printing press was invented 1500 something (in Europe, China was probably earlier), the couple dozen years with typewriters and dot-matrix printers seem like a mere blip.
- laumars 7y agoMost people aren't 1500 years old ;) Even the invention of the dot-matrix printer is older than most on here (never mind the typewriter). A fair amount of the older workforce did grow up with typewriters and, later, dot matrix printers (or even teletypes) in their offices. Many on even started their careers using computers that only supported monospaced typefaces. I remember the first time I saw variable width fonts on a VDU (as they used to call "monitors") and it took me a second or two to adjust to typeface because most of my text consumption up to that point had been with fixed with characters. Or to use an analogy: horse-drawn ploughs might have pre-dated tractors by hundreds of years but that doesn't mean I have more experience with seeing horses ploughing fields than tractors.
- cpach 7y agoWell, setting whole books in fixed-width has never been the norm. Personally I find fixed-width very hard to read for regular text. For example, compare these two documents: http://www.laputan.org/pub/papers/aim-349.pdf http://www.laputan.org/pub/papers/aim-349.pdf http://www.larcenists.org/Documentation/Documentation0.98/r7rs.pdf http://www.larcenists.org/Documentation/Documentation0.98/r7... I know which one I prefer when it comes to typography and readability.
- tomsmeding 7y agoThough in that example, to be fair, a major point in readability is the quality of the scan. Of course the LaTeX document is nicer, because it's digitally rendered instead of low-resolution scanned from a paper original. ;) That doesn't make me agree with you any less, though. Some words are just unnaturally wide in monospace.
- heavenlyblue 7y agoHowever when you’re programming, you’re looking for structural rather than semantic meaning of words. The only true meaning of natural text is the meaning given to the words; but the only true meaning of code is the way punctuation is organised around superficial natural texts within the elements.
- laumars 7y ago> Well, setting whole books in fixed-width has never been the norm. In books, I agree. Even Gutenberg's press had variable width "types". However not everyone reads books regularly and fixed width was all that was available in offices (well, that or handwritten documents). So for a great many people like myself, fixed width typefaces were still the norm.
- enriquto 7y agoIn your example, I find the typewritten text to be very beautifully laid out. The latex rendering is cluttered and uses a font which is too thin.
- cpach 7y ago
- dragonwriter 7y ago> You could argue it is easier to read (and better for the environment too) but it wasn't that long ago when fixed width was the norm (typewriters, dot-matrix printers, early micro-computers / mainframes, etc) and people read just fine. Fixed width was used because the toolchains for it were cheaper (with computers, that included software that allowed to visualize document appearance.) In the era when typewriters and dot-matrix printers dominated, sag, casual office documents, professional print still used proportional type for all the same reasons that that is the norm today, and that it was for centuries before typewriters, much less dot matrix printers.
- laumars 7y agoYou're just reiterating points I've already made (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22726239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22726239) but without understanding the point I'm making. I wasn't saying variable width didn't exist. My point was that a great many of us used to spend hours each day (many still do, in fact) working with fixed width and we managed just fine. The reason for my point is because some people on here love to overstate and exaggerate the effect different type-faces have on readability when often it's more of an issue with familiarity (eg if you only ever read fixed width typefaces then variable width types can sometimes take a moment to adjust to). To illustrate this point, use a variable width typeface in your code editor. It's still perfectly usable but man is it jarring when you're used to monospaced fonts.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> without understanding the point I'm making. You haven't previously clearly articulated your point, it wasn't clear if you were being wrong but relevant (i.e., claiming that there was no significant usability advantage to proportional fonts for text documents) or making an accurate rebuttal of a strawman argument (i.e., correctly claiming that fixed-width text has non-zero usability in rebuttal to the claim that was never made that it is completely unusable.) As such, I made the generous assumption that you understood the context which favored assuming the former, but you seem to have instead settled on the latter position. > To illustrate this point, use a variable width typeface in your code editor. It's still perfectly usable but man is it jarring when you're used to monospaced fonts. I recently transitioned to Input Sans, a proportional coding font, for all code editing full-time, after having used monospaced fonts for coding pretty much exclusively since elementary school, for a little over 35 years; it was a big improvement and the transition was not jarring at all.
- animalnewbie 7y agoMonaco (and I'm the last guy in earth to be labelled an apple fan) is my favourite font. Its damn readable. There are a lot of other readable mono fonts. Also code inherently has a structure whose readability is increased by monospace fonts.
- zokier 7y ago> Also code inherently has a structure whose readability is increased by monospace fonts. Unless you are programming in FORTRAN or COBOL, I very much contest that claim
- Lio 7y agoI do it because most of the time I’m more interested in code than comments. In my experience comments often ”lie”, so I put them in italics because they’re to taken with a pinch of salt. :)
- threatofrain 7y agoI switch my theme based on how I’m trying to read. Some themes emphasize comments, others deprioritizes them.
- animalnewbie 7y agoI have a vim snippet which highlights comments when I'm on them but fades them when the cursor is away.
- cygned 7y agoI don't use syntax highlighting. Italicized comments help my eyes skip them, especially when using a font whose italics characters are notably different (e.g. Operator Mono).
- schwuk 7y agoThere is a growing number of monospaced fonts that provide cursive italics for differentiation e.g., Operator Mono, Dank, Victor Mono. Some people prefer it, some people hate it.
- thristian 7y agoInterestingly, italic type was invented in 1500 in order to make smaller, more space-efficient books - so the first books in italics were in all-italics. It wasn't until decades later that italics started being used sparingly for emphasis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_type#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_type#History