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Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

394 points by blakewatson 4y ago

panda88888 4y ago
This is great. I am going to try it out.
raydiatian 4y ago
> Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing The article doesn’t use the font it is extolling the virtues of, except for illustration. I found that interesting. Also, there is something that gets under my skin about using anything other than monospaced to write code, as was one of the demo’s. I would genuinely be fine with writing code in a monospaced Arial or Times, but even courier-semispaced makes me shiver inexplicably.
- blakewatson 4y ago
  > The article doesn’t use the font it is extolling the virtues of, except for illustration. I found that interesting. I do use them for writing and coding.
  - raydiatian 4y ago
    Don’t misread what I am saying: I am not judging you for finding something that works for you, or attacking you for sharing. I’m bummed out to see an article about “a perfect font”, especially being a monospaced one (or nearly), but that does not use said font throughout. I was sort of hoping to be immersed in this font for awhile, but wasn’t. I use fira+ligatures. I am a monospacer too.
    - DavidAdams 4y ago
      I think the point of the article is that monospaced fonts, or near-monospaced, are good for production (writing), though arguably proportional fonts are better for consumption (reading).
      - blakewatson 4y ago
        Yeah this is my anecdotal take. Haven’t looked at studies on this, if they exist, but in my experience, reading monospaced fonts for several paragraphs is tiring.
      - raydiatian 4y ago
        I must be misunderstanding your meaning, what forms of writing don’t also require reading in the form of rereading?
delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
> iA Writer The typeface is a modification of IBM Plex Mono[0][1]. I'd recognise that 'a' glyph anywhere. [0]: https://github.com/IBM/plex https://github.com/IBM/plex [1]: https://www.ibm.com/plex/ https://www.ibm.com/plex/
- Ezku 4y ago
  Well spotted! > This is a modification of IBM's Plex font. https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts/tree/master/iA%20Writer%20Mono https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts/tree/master/iA%20Writer%20...
zichy 4y ago
I like your taste – Input and IBM Plex (on which the iA Writer family is based) are my favorites as well. iA's old typeface Nitti is great as well.
- blakewatson 4y ago
  Nitti is the OG monospaced writing font for me. Soon as I experienced it on those older versions of iA Writer I was hooked. I do love IBM Plex and these derivatives but I also miss Nitti. Might have to pick that one up from Bold Monday for old times' sake.
rgovostes 4y ago
See also: Duospaced font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duospaced_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duospaced_font
- syrrim 4y ago
  That article is strange. I was of the belief that most western "monospace" fonts were in fact "duospaced" under their definition. This distinction isn't apparent for normal writing, but such fonts usually make most emoji two chars wide. This is true at the very least for Adobe's "source code pro", which I typically use. It mentions the OP font as the only western example of such a font, but iA writer doesn't use integer multiples of the base width (necessary to qualify under their definition, as well as under common sense) for M and W.
  - derefr 4y ago
    IIRC it's not that monospaced fonts have double-width emoji; monospaced fonts just tend to not define glyphs for emoji at all, and instead allow the renderer to fall back for rendering of those glyphs to a non-monospaced font in the stack. This may result in emoji taking up basically-arbitrary width in text edit fields, breaking the monospacing. Terminal emulators, however, have a model on which glyphs are always placed onto a visual grid (the PTY render-model grid, emulating text-mode VRAM); so in a terminal emulator that supports rendering Unicode at all, any glyph will have its visual width "snapped" to an integer multiple of the grid spacing, and will be considered to take up that many grid cells. It is up to the particular terminal emulator where it places the glyph within that array of grid-cells; some left-align glyphs, others center-align.
- grose 4y ago
  PragmataPro is an example of such a font. Love it. It comes in a monospaced and duospaced variant. https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/
userbinator 4y ago
I think when a font has all the characteristics of being monospaced like large serifs etc., but actually isn't, it looks subtly "off". I remember distinctly the user manual of a motherboard I had near the turn of the century somehow had screenshots of the BIOS setup utility rendered in almost-monospaced Courier New, and it looked sufficiently weird that it was distracting.
- boredtofears 4y ago
  Courier New is monospaced. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-supplied-monospaced-truetype-fonts-93aa7a47-2149-be09-31a9-c22df598c952#:~:text=Summary,Font%20Pack%20are%20proportional%20fonts https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-supplied....
  - userbinator 4y ago
    I know it is; but they had somehow managed to change the glyphs spacing so that it isn't, yielding the same odd effect that I see in the sample in this article.
vehemenz 4y ago
Reading is a big part of writing, and I'm not sure how almost monospaced fonts would perform for reading. Probably about average, if the conclusions from this study are correct: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-reading/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-readin....
tooltower 4y ago
Another reason for using almost monospace: international languages. Many indic languages simply don't have good monospace fonts. It's not easy to design. They stick out in code, as a result. But I've always wondered if allowing three or four different widths would help. We could still align text if (narrow) spaces were the smallest unit, and other widths were repeated multiples of that. This makes me think it's doable.
- DenisM 4y ago
  Neat idea. This would probably vindicate the “tabs” people of the tabs/spaces debate.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Same goes for East Asian languages which are monospaced, but square. If you mix English (or code) with Chinese/Japanese/Korean, you get a mixed-width mess.
  - layer8 4y ago
    It’s well-defined, at least in the terminal: the east-asian characters are simply double the normal width. There’s a Unicode property to decide which is which: https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11-2/ https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11-2/
    - adastra22 4y ago
      I was saying something else. If you mix latin text and Chinese text in a monospaced font, the character boundaries no longer line up.
      - layer8 4y ago
        They still line up (when rendered with correct double-width), the east-asian characters just take up two “slots”, as if they were two normal characters. I don’t know if you see a problem with that, or if you’re talking about renderers and/or applications that don’t correctly handle this double-width logic. My point is that if handled correctly, e.g. in terminals, there is no problem with that, as long as the application is double-width aware. For example I use Mutt as a mail reader in a terminal, with Vim as an editor, and mixed latin and east-asian characters work fine with them and line up on the terminal grid.
c-smile 4y ago
For some reasons, I've found that good, old, Verdana (as used on this very HN) is the most editor/writer friendly. IMHO of course.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  Verdana is the font of the New Millennium and I will not entertain competing suggestions
- quesera 4y ago
  > Verdana (as used on this very HN) Hm. If Verdana is the render font for you here on HN, I believe that's that's all about your browser config, and nothing about HN.
  - vikingerik 4y ago
    HN does specify Verdana, so that's what you'll see unless the browser is overriding that somehow. See https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css
    - quesera 4y ago
      Oops, you are quite right! I do override it, for more than ten years. That's what I get for posting without sanity checking myself.
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  I used to use it as well. I stopped because the spaces are too small for my liking. It worked when I was using 4 spaces for indentation but now the more or less agreed-upon standard is 2 (for JS/TS which I mostly write). I wish I could create a custom version with a larger space.
- layer8 4y ago
  I fully agree, but sadly its character set is rather limited in terms of Unicode characters.
systemvoltage 4y ago
I am not convinced. They should just finish the fitting/kerning. Seems like a fad more than anything else. In the screenshot, if you were to see a properly fitted proportional version of iA Quattro, you'd ditch iA Quattro. But that comparison is not presented, I don't think they've tried making a proportional version of it.
- blakewatson 4y ago
  That’s a good point. Something close to a "properly fitted proportional version of iA Quattro" might be Nitti Grotesk. https://www.boldmonday.com/typeface/nitti-grotesk/ https://www.boldmonday.com/typeface/nitti-grotesk/
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    It's like this: A) Here is an unbaked cake. B) Here is a half-baked cake. But, the argument they are making is B) is better than C) Fully baked cake. No fully baked cake is presented for evaluation. You can't use Nitti Grotesk, a cookie batter, to make an argument here either for a fair comparison. It's an entirely different thing. In order to do a proper comparison, they should finish the kerning job and present their arguments fairly and squarly. The image I am talking about is: https://i0.wp.com/blakewatson.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ia-writer-quattro-comparison.jpg?w=1388&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/blakewatson.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022... It needs a 3rd line "iA Writer Proportional". Looking at the word "next" in iA Quattro, the fitting looks really bad which is a known trade-off in monospaced typefaces, but not an excuse to leave it like that in a proportional typeface.
    - joemi 4y ago
      Similarly, the image with Input Mono caught my eye: https://i0.wp.com/blakewatson.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/input-comparison.png?w=1327&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/blakewatson.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022... The word "chain" looks more like "cha in" which just makes the font seem unfinished to me.
      - 4y ago
bsimpson 4y ago
Isn't the whole point of monospaced fonts columnar alignment (e.g. the table in the article)? Seems like "almost" defeats the point. Then again, I don't see values lined up much these days: { "someKey": "someValue", "someOtherKey:" "someOtherValue, and if you only care about leading whitespace (that is, the whitespace before a character appears on the line), maybe it doesn't matter how your font is spaced. I suspect numbers in these almost-mono fonts are monospaced, so numerical values should still have nice rhythm too.
- blakewatson 4y ago
  Yeah, you’re right. You lose columnar alignment but beginning indentation still aligns and, in Input Sans, I believe the numbers are tabular. David Jonathan Ross makes this argument in the explainer for Input: > Sometimes programmers rely on the monospaced grid to create a second column of values or comments on the right side of the page. It’s true, these secondary columns won’t align in a proportionally spaced font. But why are we making these columns in the first place? Even in a monospaced font they can be finnicky and hard to maintain. > In virtually every other form of typography, the responsibility of alignment is given to the typesetting application, not the font. If source code editors can highlight syntax, they could also interpret tabs and syntax to create true, adjustable columns of text. https://input.djr.com/info/ https://input.djr.com/info/
  - bsimpson 4y ago
    I still can't believe personalization isn't more widespread in coding. For instance, it ought to be reasonably trivial to set up your formatting preferences in your editor, but have the file saved to disk be in a common format. You want 8-space tabs and braces on their own lines? Cool. We'll save the file with all the formatting defaults, but run a formatter tuned to your preferences before displaying.
    - kaashif 4y ago
      Here's my reason: if what I see on screen doesn't match the code actually being committed, that freaks me out. Same reason I don't like using those things where <= turns into ≤ in your editor but it's written to disk as <=.
crazygringo 4y ago
As far as I know, "American Typewriter" is basically the original "almost monospace" font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Typewriter
syrrim 4y ago
> You might be thinking, “Okay, but now characters won’t line up neatly.” Thats true, but the upside of this sizing means you still retain the typewriter aesthetic with a bit more legibility. Notice the difference? Does it? It feels like the "typewriter aesthetic" is pretty much gone. The comically wide thin characters (i, r, l, etc), and comically small wide chars (m, w) are the clearest difference of such a font; without that it looks like a normal proportional font (which it basically is).
every 4y ago
I prefer Source Code Pro for the terminal: https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-code-pro/ https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-code-pro/
- shagie 4y ago
  Source Code Pro was my go to for a long time ( https://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/source-code-pro/ https://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/source-code-pro/ gets into the design of it) - the 1Il|iO0oB8 set is where its most interesting to me (and why I liked it). However, when Jetbrains Mono came out, I switched my code editors to it (IntelliJ was trivial) - https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ (and no, I don't like ligatures). The slightly larger lowercase high at the same font size makes it a bit easier to read without boosting the entire editor's font size up, the 'g' debate I lean to the single story, open tail form ( https://www.typeroom.eu/the-elusive-mystery-of-letter-g-explained https://www.typeroom.eu/the-elusive-mystery-of-letter-g-expl... ).
  - every 4y ago
    I enjoy in Source Code Pro that every character is unambiguous...
joshjb17 4y ago
Two big reasons for continuing to use monospaced fonts in programming: 1) Support for vim navigation, where hjkl move you one character in a direction on an evenly spaced grid. Remove that uniform spacing and up ceases to be “up” 2) Legibility for formatted comments and ASCII art (could argue these should be avoided but I’ve seen some magical ASCII art in code) //////////////// // My Comment // ////////////////
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  I both use vim movement and a proportional font for coding. 1/ That’s already broken by line wrapping. gj is the command moving up in the grid not j. The fact you are confusing the two should tell you how little of a difference some sideway movement makes. 2/ Don’t use ASCII art in code. It’s annoying for people not using monospaced font and I’m not alone.
  - adrusi 4y ago
    Many people map j/k to gj/gk and forget that's not the default behavior.
  - joshjb17 4y ago
    Interesting, wasn’t aware of gj. I’ve always worked in code bases where a 120 or less character width is imposed, removing the possibility of line wrapping. TIL, mapping j to gj sounds like a good move.
CPUTranslator 4y ago
I’ve thought about ideal fonts for both writing/reading and programming quite a bit, and have been let down at the choices out there. It seems most popular monospace fonts (Fira Code, Iosevka, Ubuntu Mono, etc) attempt to either fit as many characters on the screen as possible, or are so wide, that larger sizes make it impossible to fit even a function on screen; both design choices hurt overall readability and end up forcing me to fiddle with line spacing, sizing, and custom font versions just to be somewhat happy. At this point I’ve just stuck to putting consolas on virtually every machine I use, but that’s also not great. I really hope some font foundry out there focuses on designing something specifically for readability of large bodies of monospace/duospace text. It’d also be nice to have a provable metric for readability, rather than the anecdotal evidence I tend to see, but I suspect this is hard in and of itself.
carabiner 4y ago
Meta: Why is HN obsessed with typography?
- Archelaos 4y ago
  HN likes beautiful code.
  - dfee 4y ago
    HN likes beauty.
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  Programmers work with text all day. We think of that text we work with as the subject matter very often and that sparks lively debates. There could also be an element of tradition; prestigious institutions and individuals, like Bell Labs, Donald Knuth and Apple, have devoted significant resources to typesetting and publishing, so an appreciation for typography could be seen as a marker of sophistication from that. And lastly we must often have some working knowledge of the design of user interfaces at some point in our careers, and you need to have some notions of typography to be effective at that.
- neilpanchal 4y ago
  Something that converts abstract glyphs to bezier curves and projects that to your eyes deserves attention and care. Typefaces bring the abstract idea of what a glyph is semiologically, to the physical 2D space. Made up of bezier curves, the have to abide by conventions but have considerable room in expressivity as well as design intent for a specific purpose. Typefaces are fascinating and the process of designing them is underrated and unappreciated by public at large. Billions of people rely on them, they're everywhere and you interact with typefaces all day, everyday.
- izietto 4y ago
  Because many HN readers are developers, and developers deal with characters all the time
chipotle_coyote 4y ago
I use iA Writer Duo for writing prose and fiction a lot. If you're willing to pay for typefaces, though, there's a really good "almost typewriter" font called Triplicate, which comes in four versions -- the original, a slight variation with the same metrics as Courier, a "code" version that has a few characters changed to be better for coding (this is a great alternative to the more expensive Operator Mono, in my experience), and a proportional one which fits the "almost monospaced" idea. (It's not designed for coding, but I don't think proportional fonts work for coding in most editors.)
- beaker52 4y ago
  A link for those interested: https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html
- blakewatson 4y ago
  I love Matthew Butterick's fonts (eg, Triplicate). The license for his fonts is perhaps the most generous I've seen when it comes to commercial fonts.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  Unfortunately applying both Poly and Code gives you an imperfect result: the default l glyph has a flat base, Poly makes it narrower, and Code makes it a curly tail, but enable both (e.g. font-feature-settings: "ss01", "ss02") and you get the Poly glyph rather than the Code glyph or a hybrid, both of which would be nicer, and MB has said “won’t fix” (and I haven’t gone to the trouble of patching it myself). A demo of my own of Triplicate with use of both Poly and Code: https://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-fizzbuzz/ https://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-fizzbuzz/, code is all Poly + Code, compiler errors are just Code (it uses columnar alignment, so not Poly). The lowercase l can be seen in all the figures in one form or another (e.g. “else” in bold, “result” in regular, but not “println!” because italics always uses a curly-tailed l).
  - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
    I'd never actually tried to enable both at once, but I'm not surprised it doesn't work. I love writing prose with Triplicate Poly, but I code with monospaced fonts, as neither most code editors nor most codebases seem to work that well with proportional fonts.
themadturk 4y ago
I love writing with monospaced fonts (just as the author of article says, they look "writerly"), but I detest the fonts in iA Writer. I just can't stand to look at them, so I don't use the software (which would be great if it allowed me to choose other fonts). I also hate Courier New, which is a weak and spindly font. My favorite is Courier Prime.
- blakewatson 4y ago
  Take a look at Drafting* Mono: https://indestructibletype.com/Drafting/ https://indestructibletype.com/Drafting/
  - h4n1 4y ago
    This is a great font! It feels to me almost like a 'handwritten' version of the font I use, [Julia Mono](https://juliamono.netlify.app/ https://juliamono.netlify.app/)
  - glitchc 4y ago
    Wow, this is amazing! Thank you for sharing.
  - gnuvince 4y ago
    Oh, that guy and his stupid habit of putting an asterisk in the font name—impossible to use in Emacs.
moralestapia 4y ago
It would be nice to have a space character for the 50% or 150% width some of these letters use. That way you could still line things up if you chose to do so.
- catlifeonmars 4y ago
  Isn’t that what tab does?
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    Not really, this is within characters.
    - somethingsaid 4y ago
      This exists as various white space characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_space
- idlehand 4y ago
  Would be neat to have ligatures, for example for lowercase i followed by space, to restore column alignment.
TranquilMarmot 4y ago
This is the first time I've heard of iA Writer, it looks like exactly what I need right now for nanowrimo... focused on writing prose with some minimal feedback tools. Going to give it a shot!
- sandyarmstrong 4y ago
  My first time seeing it too, it really does look appealing! I am using Scrivener's very generous Nano demo this year (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo https://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo). Free from Oct 15 - Dec 7, and at the end of that you get a 50% discount if you hit 50k words, which is pretty cool. So anyway, I've got my outline and stuff all in Scrivener but maybe I'll try iA next year, or for some other markdown writing work. It kind of reminds me of what Tomboy notes felt like in GNOME back in the day.
  - TranquilMarmot 4y ago
    Two years ago, I did nanowrimo in Vim with a whole suite of plugins: - https://github.com/preservim/vim-pencil https://github.com/preservim/vim-pencil - https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim.git https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim.git - https://github.com/junegunn/limelight.vim.git https://github.com/junegunn/limelight.vim.git - https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki It was fun, and the setup is almost identical to iA Writer which I appreciate. I even had it all on my phone with Termux! Last year I just did it in Markdown in VSCode in "zen mode" which also worked pretty well. It was definitely easier to setup than Vim and had better highlighting of bold/italics/etc.
- blakewatson 4y ago
  Good luck! I'm also doing Nano and was supposed to be working on my novel but instead I wrote about the font I was using.
ComputerGuru 4y ago
See also: a little bit pregnant, almost alive, and close but no cigar. Yes, I read the article to the end. No, I don’t get it. Either they line up or they don’t. Either it’s monospace or it’s not.
- vehemenz 4y ago
  Within the fonts that aren't monospace, some fonts have less variation in glyph width than others. It's a spectrum. You can choose a font that is mostly monospace, but not completely, to confer benefits for readability. If all you're saying is that you personally don't care to make a finer distinction than monospace/proportional, that's fine, but it's probably not worth commenting on either.
  - ComputerGuru 4y ago
    There is nothing that says monospaced fonts are more readable. In fact, they’re probably not since you can’t give neither whitespace nor character components like the ascenders/descenders/bowls/stem/etc the space they need to shine relative to each other. Monospace has one and only one redeeming quality that makes it worth using over proportional fonts: it lines up.
kstenerud 4y ago
"You might be thinking, “Okay, but now characters won’t line up neatly.” Thats true, but the upside of this sizing means you still retain the typewriter aesthetic with a bit more legibility. Notice the difference?" Umm... no? "The difference is subtle but notice that the sample on the right gives letters like lowercase “m” a little leg room, improving the readability of the code." Uhh... If you say so... I honestly don't see any of the upsides he's talking about. But the downside of things not lining up is definitely real.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  Too true. The only reason to use monospace is to line up the characters. If I don't need characters lined up I can use just about any font there is. So this font is not competing with monospace fonts, it's competing with all non-monospaced fonts, so there's really no advantage in using it.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  "The difference is subtle" I noticed the difference immediately — but not in a good way. I just felt a much stronger preference for the version on the left, the true monospace. I initially put it down to the indent — that "n" beginning "num" just looks horribly placed wrt to line above it — but, on reflection, I think it's the 'sans' properties that make it less pleasant for me — like the "i" and "l" in "while" that are much rounder and, of course, without even slab serifs.
svat 4y ago
Meanwhile, at the other extreme, in many proportional fonts the widths of letters vary so characteristically that clever readers can decode a text mostly just from the widths: see Donald Knuth's "N-ciphered texts": https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3283&context=wordways https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... (Not linking the solutions here to make it harder to spoil the puzzle, but you can find them online with a bit of effort — maybe this will help: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3283&context=wordways https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... — and it's also reprinted in Selected Papers on Fun and Games.)
asciimov 4y ago
Not sure if it's the font, the colors, the kerning, or my browser, but this website hurts my eyes!
- blakewatson 4y ago
  Sorry to hear that. There's a toggle switch for light mode if that helps.
flobosg 4y ago
A while ago, while repurposing an old laptop into a distraction-free “typewriter” I researched fonts with a typewriter-like aesthetic. Here’s what I found: Sun Gallant Demi, Solarize, Libertine/Libertinus Mono, Triplicate, Prestige Elite, CMU Typewriter, Latin Modern Mono, MingLiU, sony-misc, Verily Serif Mono, Century Schoolbook Mono BT, UM Typewriter, American Typewriter, Courier, Pitch, TiredOfCourier, Xanh Mono, DSE Typewriter, LTC Remington Typewriter, Bitstream Pica 10 Pitch, Italian Typewriter, Typist Slab, FF Elementa, EF Techno Script, Drafting* Mono, Bodoni Egyptian Mono. (I don’t remember which one I ended up using, though.)
- fbdab103 4y ago
  >(I don’t remember which one I ended up using, though.) Buried the lede on that one. Was looking forward to the recommended typewriter font.
  - Multicomp 4y ago
    The freeware screenwriting program trelby had some articles that led to one recommending the use of courier prime. I use it when I am working on manuscript copy, it could probably do okay for programming as well. https://www.1001fonts.com/courier-prime-font.html https://www.1001fonts.com/courier-prime-font.html
- AlanYx 4y ago
  Another one you might like is TT2020: https://copypaste.wtf/TT2020/docs/moreinfo2.html https://copypaste.wtf/TT2020/docs/moreinfo2.html This one aims to replicate the ink characteristics of typewriters; there are 9 versions of each glyph that get combined via Unicode rules to simulate the way typewriters would inconsistently distribute ink.
raldi 4y ago
To each their own, but this reads to me like an April Fool’s post.
tapanjk 4y ago
> But there is a reason we don’t use monospaced fonts everywhere. They are somewhat hard to read because [...] Well, not sure what is the basis for that assertion, but I find it easier to read text rendered in a monospaced font (Courier is my favorite). In fact, when I need to read something longer than a minute on the browser, I switch to monospace (with help of a browser plugin). It's not about text alignment -- it does not matter when reading prose, but perhaps about the familiarity of a font. As an aside, I also try to get rid of formatting when reading long text. It allows me to focus on the essence of the written word. Perhaps, this is why the old school mailing lists and message forums are more appealing than the modern crop of social media apps. Also plain text email (what a rarity in the corporate world today!).
- upofadown 4y ago
  Yeah, if everyone was used to reading monospaced fonts then proportional fonts would be hard to read. I suspect there might be a bit of an advantage for proportional in terms of ultimate reading speed in that you might be able to fit in an extra word in your scan, but the alignment of a fixed grid might help a bit too. The real value of proportional fonts is that you can print more stuff on the page and make your book shorter and cheaper. In today's world the paper is basically free, so that is no longer an issue. It just means that you have less text on the screen and will have to page a bit more often.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I have to disagree a bit. Even stipulating that there may be some economic drivers for more compact text, my observation is people largely switched to using proportional fonts (outside of some specialty cases like code or tabular data) as soon as it was technologically possible to do so. People generally preferred proportional fonts when it was practical to use them with the equipment reasonable at their disposal.
makach 4y ago
My use case for monospace is actually to align things perfectly when I write code. /Almost monospace/ is probably great _for writing_, but I find it a bit frustrating that the author doesn't address lining up things with /almost monospace/...
karmakaze 4y ago
Input is a great programming font. It also lets you customize a bunch of options (e.g. slashed-0, loopy-a or g, serifs on i/l, etc). Free download for private use[0]. [0] https://input.djr.com/download/ https://input.djr.com/download/
thih9 4y ago
Is it possible to use a font like this in a terminal emulator?
vbernat 4y ago
Iosevka, a customizable monospace font, also has quasi-proportional (almost monospace) varients: Iosevka Aile and Iosevka Etoile.
devmunchies 4y ago
I use a lowercase “L” and “LST” (in lowercase) for variables representing lists in function args. For me the lower L and the number 1 have to be different. Most mono fonts make them almost identical. Typing “lst” looks like 1st (First). They either need to curve the bottom of the lowercase “L” or remove the bottom bar of the one.
akho 4y ago
I’d say that for coding the critical bit is not “things lining up” — it’s a bad practice anyway — but wide and clear punctuation (`[{(` &c).
Gordonjcp 4y ago
In the iA Writer Quattro font sample look at the kerning in the word "buckles". You could drive a bus through the gap between the 'u' and the 'c'.
s_dev 4y ago
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
efortis 4y ago
Here's proportional font for camelCase programming. It adds a padding to the left of the capital letters, and has a much wider space character. https://ericfortis.com/portfolio/design#-verdana-camel https://ericfortis.com/portfolio/design#-verdana-camel --- For aligning content, I think IDEs should be able to represent some parts of the code as tables. For example, similar to the Decision Tables of Jetbrains Projectional Editor: https://youtu.be/iN2PflvXUqQ?t=357 https://youtu.be/iN2PflvXUqQ?t=357
leephillips 4y ago
Proportional “typewriter” fonts are an old idea. TeX has them (cvtt).
mbauman 4y ago
It'd be interesting to have an eventually-consistent monospaced font that adjusts the widths of characters like `w` and `i` such that when they're within a few characters of eachother they become more proportional. Obviously adjacent characters can be done with ligatures so `wi` is still 2 char-widths wide, but aren't modern font-rendering systems smart enough to do more than ligatures with alternatives? I wonder what it'd feel like to watch these characters adjust width as you type.
Terretta 4y ago
There's an easy solution to stop worrying among input, iosevka, source code pro, consolas, and the like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalé_Mono https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalé_Mono $ brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts # You only need to do this once! $ brew install font-andale-mono Of course, most other recommendations in this thread are available as well: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask-fonts/tree/master/Casks https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask-fonts/tree/master/... These land in the same folder as user installs through Font Book. Using homebrew makes moving to a new system as easy as bundling the Brewfile.

394 points by blakewatson 4y ago

This is great. I am going to try it out.

> Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing The article doesn’t use the font it is extolling the virtues of, except for illustration. I found that interesting. Also, there is something that gets under my skin about using anything other than monospaced to write code, as was one of the demo’s. I would genuinely be fine with writing code in a monospaced Arial or Times, but even courier-semispaced makes me shiver inexplicably.

blakewatson 4y ago
> The article doesn’t use the font it is extolling the virtues of, except for illustration. I found that interesting. I do use them for writing and coding.
- raydiatian 4y ago
  Don’t misread what I am saying: I am not judging you for finding something that works for you, or attacking you for sharing. I’m bummed out to see an article about “a perfect font”, especially being a monospaced one (or nearly), but that does not use said font throughout. I was sort of hoping to be immersed in this font for awhile, but wasn’t. I use fira+ligatures. I am a monospacer too.
  - DavidAdams 4y ago
    I think the point of the article is that monospaced fonts, or near-monospaced, are good for production (writing), though arguably proportional fonts are better for consumption (reading).
    - blakewatson 4y ago
      Yeah this is my anecdotal take. Haven’t looked at studies on this, if they exist, but in my experience, reading monospaced fonts for several paragraphs is tiring.
    - raydiatian 4y ago
      I must be misunderstanding your meaning, what forms of writing don’t also require reading in the form of rereading?

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago

> iA Writer The typeface is a modification of IBM Plex Mono[0][1]. I'd recognise that 'a' glyph anywhere. [0]: https://github.com/IBM/plex https://github.com/IBM/plex [1]: https://www.ibm.com/plex/ https://www.ibm.com/plex/

Ezku 4y ago
Well spotted! > This is a modification of IBM's Plex font. https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts/tree/master/iA%20Writer%20Mono https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts/tree/master/iA%20Writer%20...

zichy 4y ago

I like your taste – Input and IBM Plex (on which the iA Writer family is based) are my favorites as well. iA's old typeface Nitti is great as well.

blakewatson 4y ago
Nitti is the OG monospaced writing font for me. Soon as I experienced it on those older versions of iA Writer I was hooked. I do love IBM Plex and these derivatives but I also miss Nitti. Might have to pick that one up from Bold Monday for old times' sake.

rgovostes 4y ago

See also: Duospaced font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duospaced_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duospaced_font

syrrim 4y ago
That article is strange. I was of the belief that most western "monospace" fonts were in fact "duospaced" under their definition. This distinction isn't apparent for normal writing, but such fonts usually make most emoji two chars wide. This is true at the very least for Adobe's "source code pro", which I typically use. It mentions the OP font as the only western example of such a font, but iA writer doesn't use integer multiples of the base width (necessary to qualify under their definition, as well as under common sense) for M and W.
- derefr 4y ago
  IIRC it's not that monospaced fonts have double-width emoji; monospaced fonts just tend to not define glyphs for emoji at all, and instead allow the renderer to fall back for rendering of those glyphs to a non-monospaced font in the stack. This may result in emoji taking up basically-arbitrary width in text edit fields, breaking the monospacing. Terminal emulators, however, have a model on which glyphs are always placed onto a visual grid (the PTY render-model grid, emulating text-mode VRAM); so in a terminal emulator that supports rendering Unicode at all, any glyph will have its visual width "snapped" to an integer multiple of the grid spacing, and will be considered to take up that many grid cells. It is up to the particular terminal emulator where it places the glyph within that array of grid-cells; some left-align glyphs, others center-align.
grose 4y ago
PragmataPro is an example of such a font. Love it. It comes in a monospaced and duospaced variant. https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

userbinator 4y ago

I think when a font has all the characteristics of being monospaced like large serifs etc., but actually isn't, it looks subtly "off". I remember distinctly the user manual of a motherboard I had near the turn of the century somehow had screenshots of the BIOS setup utility rendered in almost-monospaced Courier New, and it looked sufficiently weird that it was distracting.

boredtofears 4y ago
Courier New is monospaced. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-supplied-monospaced-truetype-fonts-93aa7a47-2149-be09-31a9-c22df598c952#:~:text=Summary,Font%20Pack%20are%20proportional%20fonts https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-supplied....
- userbinator 4y ago
  I know it is; but they had somehow managed to change the glyphs spacing so that it isn't, yielding the same odd effect that I see in the sample in this article.

vehemenz 4y ago

Reading is a big part of writing, and I'm not sure how almost monospaced fonts would perform for reading. Probably about average, if the conclusions from this study are correct: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-reading/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-readin....

tooltower 4y ago

Another reason for using almost monospace: international languages. Many indic languages simply don't have good monospace fonts. It's not easy to design. They stick out in code, as a result. But I've always wondered if allowing three or four different widths would help. We could still align text if (narrow) spaces were the smallest unit, and other widths were repeated multiples of that. This makes me think it's doable.

DenisM 4y ago
Neat idea. This would probably vindicate the “tabs” people of the tabs/spaces debate.
adastra22 4y ago
Same goes for East Asian languages which are monospaced, but square. If you mix English (or code) with Chinese/Japanese/Korean, you get a mixed-width mess.
- layer8 4y ago
  It’s well-defined, at least in the terminal: the east-asian characters are simply double the normal width. There’s a Unicode property to decide which is which: https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11-2/ https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11-2/
  - adastra22 4y ago
    I was saying something else. If you mix latin text and Chinese text in a monospaced font, the character boundaries no longer line up.
    - layer8 4y ago
      They still line up (when rendered with correct double-width), the east-asian characters just take up two “slots”, as if they were two normal characters. I don’t know if you see a problem with that, or if you’re talking about renderers and/or applications that don’t correctly handle this double-width logic. My point is that if handled correctly, e.g. in terminals, there is no problem with that, as long as the application is double-width aware. For example I use Mutt as a mail reader in a terminal, with Vim as an editor, and mixed latin and east-asian characters work fine with them and line up on the terminal grid.

c-smile 4y ago

For some reasons, I've found that good, old, Verdana (as used on this very HN) is the most editor/writer friendly. IMHO of course.

SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
Verdana is the font of the New Millennium and I will not entertain competing suggestions
quesera 4y ago
> Verdana (as used on this very HN) Hm. If Verdana is the render font for you here on HN, I believe that's that's all about your browser config, and nothing about HN.
- vikingerik 4y ago
  HN does specify Verdana, so that's what you'll see unless the browser is overriding that somehow. See https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css
  - quesera 4y ago
    Oops, you are quite right! I do override it, for more than ten years. That's what I get for posting without sanity checking myself.
kristiandupont 4y ago
I used to use it as well. I stopped because the spaces are too small for my liking. It worked when I was using 4 spaces for indentation but now the more or less agreed-upon standard is 2 (for JS/TS which I mostly write). I wish I could create a custom version with a larger space.
layer8 4y ago
I fully agree, but sadly its character set is rather limited in terms of Unicode characters.

systemvoltage 4y ago

I am not convinced. They should just finish the fitting/kerning. Seems like a fad more than anything else. In the screenshot, if you were to see a properly fitted proportional version of iA Quattro, you'd ditch iA Quattro. But that comparison is not presented, I don't think they've tried making a proportional version of it.

blakewatson 4y ago
That’s a good point. Something close to a "properly fitted proportional version of iA Quattro" might be Nitti Grotesk. https://www.boldmonday.com/typeface/nitti-grotesk/ https://www.boldmonday.com/typeface/nitti-grotesk/
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  It's like this: A) Here is an unbaked cake. B) Here is a half-baked cake. But, the argument they are making is B) is better than C) Fully baked cake. No fully baked cake is presented for evaluation. You can't use Nitti Grotesk, a cookie batter, to make an argument here either for a fair comparison. It's an entirely different thing. In order to do a proper comparison, they should finish the kerning job and present their arguments fairly and squarly. The image I am talking about is: https://i0.wp.com/blakewatson.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ia-writer-quattro-comparison.jpg?w=1388&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/blakewatson.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022... It needs a 3rd line "iA Writer Proportional". Looking at the word "next" in iA Quattro, the fitting looks really bad which is a known trade-off in monospaced typefaces, but not an excuse to leave it like that in a proportional typeface.
  - joemi 4y ago
    Similarly, the image with Input Mono caught my eye: https://i0.wp.com/blakewatson.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/input-comparison.png?w=1327&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/blakewatson.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022... The word "chain" looks more like "cha in" which just makes the font seem unfinished to me.
    - 4y ago

bsimpson 4y ago

Isn't the whole point of monospaced fonts columnar alignment (e.g. the table in the article)? Seems like "almost" defeats the point. Then again, I don't see values lined up much these days: { "someKey": "someValue", "someOtherKey:" "someOtherValue, and if you only care about leading whitespace (that is, the whitespace before a character appears on the line), maybe it doesn't matter how your font is spaced. I suspect numbers in these almost-mono fonts are monospaced, so numerical values should still have nice rhythm too.

blakewatson 4y ago
Yeah, you’re right. You lose columnar alignment but beginning indentation still aligns and, in Input Sans, I believe the numbers are tabular. David Jonathan Ross makes this argument in the explainer for Input: > Sometimes programmers rely on the monospaced grid to create a second column of values or comments on the right side of the page. It’s true, these secondary columns won’t align in a proportionally spaced font. But why are we making these columns in the first place? Even in a monospaced font they can be finnicky and hard to maintain. > In virtually every other form of typography, the responsibility of alignment is given to the typesetting application, not the font. If source code editors can highlight syntax, they could also interpret tabs and syntax to create true, adjustable columns of text. https://input.djr.com/info/ https://input.djr.com/info/
- bsimpson 4y ago
  I still can't believe personalization isn't more widespread in coding. For instance, it ought to be reasonably trivial to set up your formatting preferences in your editor, but have the file saved to disk be in a common format. You want 8-space tabs and braces on their own lines? Cool. We'll save the file with all the formatting defaults, but run a formatter tuned to your preferences before displaying.
  - kaashif 4y ago
    Here's my reason: if what I see on screen doesn't match the code actually being committed, that freaks me out. Same reason I don't like using those things where <= turns into ≤ in your editor but it's written to disk as <=.

crazygringo 4y ago

As far as I know, "American Typewriter" is basically the original "almost monospace" font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Typewriter

syrrim 4y ago

> You might be thinking, “Okay, but now characters won’t line up neatly.” Thats true, but the upside of this sizing means you still retain the typewriter aesthetic with a bit more legibility. Notice the difference? Does it? It feels like the "typewriter aesthetic" is pretty much gone. The comically wide thin characters (i, r, l, etc), and comically small wide chars (m, w) are the clearest difference of such a font; without that it looks like a normal proportional font (which it basically is).

every 4y ago

I prefer Source Code Pro for the terminal: https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-code-pro/ https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-code-pro/

shagie 4y ago
Source Code Pro was my go to for a long time ( https://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/source-code-pro/ https://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/source-code-pro/ gets into the design of it) - the 1Il|iO0oB8 set is where its most interesting to me (and why I liked it). However, when Jetbrains Mono came out, I switched my code editors to it (IntelliJ was trivial) - https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ (and no, I don't like ligatures). The slightly larger lowercase high at the same font size makes it a bit easier to read without boosting the entire editor's font size up, the 'g' debate I lean to the single story, open tail form ( https://www.typeroom.eu/the-elusive-mystery-of-letter-g-explained https://www.typeroom.eu/the-elusive-mystery-of-letter-g-expl... ).
- every 4y ago
  I enjoy in Source Code Pro that every character is unambiguous...

joshjb17 4y ago

Two big reasons for continuing to use monospaced fonts in programming: 1) Support for vim navigation, where hjkl move you one character in a direction on an evenly spaced grid. Remove that uniform spacing and up ceases to be “up” 2) Legibility for formatted comments and ASCII art (could argue these should be avoided but I’ve seen some magical ASCII art in code) //////////////// // My Comment // ////////////////

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
I both use vim movement and a proportional font for coding. 1/ That’s already broken by line wrapping. gj is the command moving up in the grid not j. The fact you are confusing the two should tell you how little of a difference some sideway movement makes. 2/ Don’t use ASCII art in code. It’s annoying for people not using monospaced font and I’m not alone.
- adrusi 4y ago
  Many people map j/k to gj/gk and forget that's not the default behavior.
- joshjb17 4y ago
  Interesting, wasn’t aware of gj. I’ve always worked in code bases where a 120 or less character width is imposed, removing the possibility of line wrapping. TIL, mapping j to gj sounds like a good move.

CPUTranslator 4y ago

I’ve thought about ideal fonts for both writing/reading and programming quite a bit, and have been let down at the choices out there. It seems most popular monospace fonts (Fira Code, Iosevka, Ubuntu Mono, etc) attempt to either fit as many characters on the screen as possible, or are so wide, that larger sizes make it impossible to fit even a function on screen; both design choices hurt overall readability and end up forcing me to fiddle with line spacing, sizing, and custom font versions just to be somewhat happy. At this point I’ve just stuck to putting consolas on virtually every machine I use, but that’s also not great. I really hope some font foundry out there focuses on designing something specifically for readability of large bodies of monospace/duospace text. It’d also be nice to have a provable metric for readability, rather than the anecdotal evidence I tend to see, but I suspect this is hard in and of itself.

carabiner 4y ago

Meta: Why is HN obsessed with typography?

Archelaos 4y ago
HN likes beautiful code.
- dfee 4y ago
  HN likes beauty.
forgetfulness 4y ago
Programmers work with text all day. We think of that text we work with as the subject matter very often and that sparks lively debates. There could also be an element of tradition; prestigious institutions and individuals, like Bell Labs, Donald Knuth and Apple, have devoted significant resources to typesetting and publishing, so an appreciation for typography could be seen as a marker of sophistication from that. And lastly we must often have some working knowledge of the design of user interfaces at some point in our careers, and you need to have some notions of typography to be effective at that.
neilpanchal 4y ago
Something that converts abstract glyphs to bezier curves and projects that to your eyes deserves attention and care. Typefaces bring the abstract idea of what a glyph is semiologically, to the physical 2D space. Made up of bezier curves, the have to abide by conventions but have considerable room in expressivity as well as design intent for a specific purpose. Typefaces are fascinating and the process of designing them is underrated and unappreciated by public at large. Billions of people rely on them, they're everywhere and you interact with typefaces all day, everyday.
izietto 4y ago
Because many HN readers are developers, and developers deal with characters all the time

chipotle_coyote 4y ago

I use iA Writer Duo for writing prose and fiction a lot. If you're willing to pay for typefaces, though, there's a really good "almost typewriter" font called Triplicate, which comes in four versions -- the original, a slight variation with the same metrics as Courier, a "code" version that has a few characters changed to be better for coding (this is a great alternative to the more expensive Operator Mono, in my experience), and a proportional one which fits the "almost monospaced" idea. (It's not designed for coding, but I don't think proportional fonts work for coding in most editors.)

beaker52 4y ago
A link for those interested: https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html
blakewatson 4y ago
I love Matthew Butterick's fonts (eg, Triplicate). The license for his fonts is perhaps the most generous I've seen when it comes to commercial fonts.
chrismorgan 4y ago
Unfortunately applying both Poly and Code gives you an imperfect result: the default l glyph has a flat base, Poly makes it narrower, and Code makes it a curly tail, but enable both (e.g. font-feature-settings: "ss01", "ss02") and you get the Poly glyph rather than the Code glyph or a hybrid, both of which would be nicer, and MB has said “won’t fix” (and I haven’t gone to the trouble of patching it myself). A demo of my own of Triplicate with use of both Poly and Code: https://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-fizzbuzz/ https://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-fizzbuzz/, code is all Poly + Code, compiler errors are just Code (it uses columnar alignment, so not Poly). The lowercase l can be seen in all the figures in one form or another (e.g. “else” in bold, “result” in regular, but not “println!” because italics always uses a curly-tailed l).
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  I'd never actually tried to enable both at once, but I'm not surprised it doesn't work. I love writing prose with Triplicate Poly, but I code with monospaced fonts, as neither most code editors nor most codebases seem to work that well with proportional fonts.

themadturk 4y ago

I love writing with monospaced fonts (just as the author of article says, they look "writerly"), but I detest the fonts in iA Writer. I just can't stand to look at them, so I don't use the software (which would be great if it allowed me to choose other fonts). I also hate Courier New, which is a weak and spindly font. My favorite is Courier Prime.

blakewatson 4y ago
Take a look at Drafting* Mono: https://indestructibletype.com/Drafting/ https://indestructibletype.com/Drafting/
- h4n1 4y ago
  This is a great font! It feels to me almost like a 'handwritten' version of the font I use, [Julia Mono](https://juliamono.netlify.app/ https://juliamono.netlify.app/)
- glitchc 4y ago
  Wow, this is amazing! Thank you for sharing.
- gnuvince 4y ago
  Oh, that guy and his stupid habit of putting an asterisk in the font name—impossible to use in Emacs.

moralestapia 4y ago

It would be nice to have a space character for the 50% or 150% width some of these letters use. That way you could still line things up if you chose to do so.

catlifeonmars 4y ago
Isn’t that what tab does?
- moralestapia 4y ago
  Not really, this is within characters.
  - somethingsaid 4y ago
    This exists as various white space characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_space
idlehand 4y ago
Would be neat to have ligatures, for example for lowercase i followed by space, to restore column alignment.

TranquilMarmot 4y ago

This is the first time I've heard of iA Writer, it looks like exactly what I need right now for nanowrimo... focused on writing prose with some minimal feedback tools. Going to give it a shot!

sandyarmstrong 4y ago
My first time seeing it too, it really does look appealing! I am using Scrivener's very generous Nano demo this year (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo https://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo). Free from Oct 15 - Dec 7, and at the end of that you get a 50% discount if you hit 50k words, which is pretty cool. So anyway, I've got my outline and stuff all in Scrivener but maybe I'll try iA next year, or for some other markdown writing work. It kind of reminds me of what Tomboy notes felt like in GNOME back in the day.
- TranquilMarmot 4y ago
  Two years ago, I did nanowrimo in Vim with a whole suite of plugins: - https://github.com/preservim/vim-pencil https://github.com/preservim/vim-pencil - https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim.git https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim.git - https://github.com/junegunn/limelight.vim.git https://github.com/junegunn/limelight.vim.git - https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki It was fun, and the setup is almost identical to iA Writer which I appreciate. I even had it all on my phone with Termux! Last year I just did it in Markdown in VSCode in "zen mode" which also worked pretty well. It was definitely easier to setup than Vim and had better highlighting of bold/italics/etc.
blakewatson 4y ago
Good luck! I'm also doing Nano and was supposed to be working on my novel but instead I wrote about the font I was using.

ComputerGuru 4y ago

See also: a little bit pregnant, almost alive, and close but no cigar. Yes, I read the article to the end. No, I don’t get it. Either they line up or they don’t. Either it’s monospace or it’s not.

vehemenz 4y ago
Within the fonts that aren't monospace, some fonts have less variation in glyph width than others. It's a spectrum. You can choose a font that is mostly monospace, but not completely, to confer benefits for readability. If all you're saying is that you personally don't care to make a finer distinction than monospace/proportional, that's fine, but it's probably not worth commenting on either.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  There is nothing that says monospaced fonts are more readable. In fact, they’re probably not since you can’t give neither whitespace nor character components like the ascenders/descenders/bowls/stem/etc the space they need to shine relative to each other. Monospace has one and only one redeeming quality that makes it worth using over proportional fonts: it lines up.

kstenerud 4y ago

"You might be thinking, “Okay, but now characters won’t line up neatly.” Thats true, but the upside of this sizing means you still retain the typewriter aesthetic with a bit more legibility. Notice the difference?" Umm... no? "The difference is subtle but notice that the sample on the right gives letters like lowercase “m” a little leg room, improving the readability of the code." Uhh... If you say so... I honestly don't see any of the upsides he's talking about. But the downside of things not lining up is definitely real.

lelanthran 4y ago
Too true. The only reason to use monospace is to line up the characters. If I don't need characters lined up I can use just about any font there is. So this font is not competing with monospace fonts, it's competing with all non-monospaced fonts, so there's really no advantage in using it.
oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
"The difference is subtle" I noticed the difference immediately — but not in a good way. I just felt a much stronger preference for the version on the left, the true monospace. I initially put it down to the indent — that "n" beginning "num" just looks horribly placed wrt to line above it — but, on reflection, I think it's the 'sans' properties that make it less pleasant for me — like the "i" and "l" in "while" that are much rounder and, of course, without even slab serifs.

svat 4y ago

Meanwhile, at the other extreme, in many proportional fonts the widths of letters vary so characteristically that clever readers can decode a text mostly just from the widths: see Donald Knuth's "N-ciphered texts": https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3283&context=wordways https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... (Not linking the solutions here to make it harder to spoil the puzzle, but you can find them online with a bit of effort — maybe this will help: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3283&context=wordways https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... — and it's also reprinted in Selected Papers on Fun and Games.)

asciimov 4y ago

Not sure if it's the font, the colors, the kerning, or my browser, but this website hurts my eyes!

blakewatson 4y ago
Sorry to hear that. There's a toggle switch for light mode if that helps.

flobosg 4y ago

A while ago, while repurposing an old laptop into a distraction-free “typewriter” I researched fonts with a typewriter-like aesthetic. Here’s what I found: Sun Gallant Demi, Solarize, Libertine/Libertinus Mono, Triplicate, Prestige Elite, CMU Typewriter, Latin Modern Mono, MingLiU, sony-misc, Verily Serif Mono, Century Schoolbook Mono BT, UM Typewriter, American Typewriter, Courier, Pitch, TiredOfCourier, Xanh Mono, DSE Typewriter, LTC Remington Typewriter, Bitstream Pica 10 Pitch, Italian Typewriter, Typist Slab, FF Elementa, EF Techno Script, Drafting* Mono, Bodoni Egyptian Mono. (I don’t remember which one I ended up using, though.)

fbdab103 4y ago
>(I don’t remember which one I ended up using, though.) Buried the lede on that one. Was looking forward to the recommended typewriter font.
- Multicomp 4y ago
  The freeware screenwriting program trelby had some articles that led to one recommending the use of courier prime. I use it when I am working on manuscript copy, it could probably do okay for programming as well. https://www.1001fonts.com/courier-prime-font.html https://www.1001fonts.com/courier-prime-font.html
AlanYx 4y ago
Another one you might like is TT2020: https://copypaste.wtf/TT2020/docs/moreinfo2.html https://copypaste.wtf/TT2020/docs/moreinfo2.html This one aims to replicate the ink characteristics of typewriters; there are 9 versions of each glyph that get combined via Unicode rules to simulate the way typewriters would inconsistently distribute ink.

raldi 4y ago

To each their own, but this reads to me like an April Fool’s post.

tapanjk 4y ago

> But there is a reason we don’t use monospaced fonts everywhere. They are somewhat hard to read because [...] Well, not sure what is the basis for that assertion, but I find it easier to read text rendered in a monospaced font (Courier is my favorite). In fact, when I need to read something longer than a minute on the browser, I switch to monospace (with help of a browser plugin). It's not about text alignment -- it does not matter when reading prose, but perhaps about the familiarity of a font. As an aside, I also try to get rid of formatting when reading long text. It allows me to focus on the essence of the written word. Perhaps, this is why the old school mailing lists and message forums are more appealing than the modern crop of social media apps. Also plain text email (what a rarity in the corporate world today!).

upofadown 4y ago
Yeah, if everyone was used to reading monospaced fonts then proportional fonts would be hard to read. I suspect there might be a bit of an advantage for proportional in terms of ultimate reading speed in that you might be able to fit in an extra word in your scan, but the alignment of a fixed grid might help a bit too. The real value of proportional fonts is that you can print more stuff on the page and make your book shorter and cheaper. In today's world the paper is basically free, so that is no longer an issue. It just means that you have less text on the screen and will have to page a bit more often.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I have to disagree a bit. Even stipulating that there may be some economic drivers for more compact text, my observation is people largely switched to using proportional fonts (outside of some specialty cases like code or tabular data) as soon as it was technologically possible to do so. People generally preferred proportional fonts when it was practical to use them with the equipment reasonable at their disposal.

makach 4y ago

My use case for monospace is actually to align things perfectly when I write code. /Almost monospace/ is probably great _for writing_, but I find it a bit frustrating that the author doesn't address lining up things with /almost monospace/...

karmakaze 4y ago

Input is a great programming font. It also lets you customize a bunch of options (e.g. slashed-0, loopy-a or g, serifs on i/l, etc). Free download for private use[0]. [0] https://input.djr.com/download/ https://input.djr.com/download/

thih9 4y ago

Is it possible to use a font like this in a terminal emulator?

vbernat 4y ago

Iosevka, a customizable monospace font, also has quasi-proportional (almost monospace) varients: Iosevka Aile and Iosevka Etoile.

devmunchies 4y ago

I use a lowercase “L” and “LST” (in lowercase) for variables representing lists in function args. For me the lower L and the number 1 have to be different. Most mono fonts make them almost identical. Typing “lst” looks like 1st (First). They either need to curve the bottom of the lowercase “L” or remove the bottom bar of the one.

akho 4y ago

I’d say that for coding the critical bit is not “things lining up” — it’s a bad practice anyway — but wide and clear punctuation (`[{(` &c).

Gordonjcp 4y ago

In the iA Writer Quattro font sample look at the kerning in the word "buckles". You could drive a bus through the gap between the 'u' and the 'c'.

s_dev 4y ago

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/

efortis 4y ago

Here's proportional font for camelCase programming. It adds a padding to the left of the capital letters, and has a much wider space character. https://ericfortis.com/portfolio/design#-verdana-camel https://ericfortis.com/portfolio/design#-verdana-camel --- For aligning content, I think IDEs should be able to represent some parts of the code as tables. For example, similar to the Decision Tables of Jetbrains Projectional Editor: https://youtu.be/iN2PflvXUqQ?t=357 https://youtu.be/iN2PflvXUqQ?t=357

leephillips 4y ago

Proportional “typewriter” fonts are an old idea. TeX has them (cvtt).

mbauman 4y ago

It'd be interesting to have an eventually-consistent monospaced font that adjusts the widths of characters like `w` and `i` such that when they're within a few characters of eachother they become more proportional. Obviously adjacent characters can be done with ligatures so `wi` is still 2 char-widths wide, but aren't modern font-rendering systems smart enough to do more than ligatures with alternatives? I wonder what it'd feel like to watch these characters adjust width as you type.

Terretta 4y ago

There's an easy solution to stop worrying among input, iosevka, source code pro, consolas, and the like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalé_Mono https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalé_Mono $ brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts # You only need to do this once! $ brew install font-andale-mono Of course, most other recommendations in this thread are available as well: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask-fonts/tree/master/Casks https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask-fonts/tree/master/... These land in the same folder as user installs through Font Book. Using homebrew makes moving to a new system as easy as bundling the Brewfile.