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> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do. > monospaced and thus fatiguing to read. Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who rea
by j2kun 5mo ago
> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do.
> monospaced and thus fatiguing to read.
Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king
- jsw97 5mo agoThere is a real use case for a viewer if you have a lot of formulas. Yes you can read the raw latex but you go cross-eyed after a while. Maybe I am a softie though.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- j2kun 5mo agoI agree, but I don't think the author of this blog post is coming from that perspective, and markdown renderers of the sort described in the post tend to do pretty poorly with math typesetting.
- tptacek 5mo agoThere's a reason we're not reading monospaced here, and a reason we do read monospaced code. But the beauty of this moment is that if you want a really good SwiftUI monospaced Markdown reader, you can have it before dinner. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have an idiosyncratic personal preference, and it's now reasonable to expect software to shrink-wrap around that preference.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago> a reason we're not reading monospaced here Legacy decisions as a remnant from a time when taking more space on paper cost pages and therefore resources, remaining as a default from centuries of inertia in how text is printed?
- tptacek 5mo agoNo, prose set in monospace is harder to read. The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working. But seriously: you do you. There are people who code in proportional typefaces and they're as baffling to me as you are right now. Let a thousand Markdown viewers bloom.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago> The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working. The legacy is proportional, at least in Latin script and its ancestors. Handwriting was proportional, of course, and so was Gutenberg's printing press. Books and newspapers have virtually always been printed in proportional type. In Chinese and Japanese, monospace is legacy in both handwriting and print... and also still universally used today. All Chinese and Japanese text is monospaced by default. Billions of people are getting by just fine reading monospaced prose. I don't really know where this conception that monospaced is somehow objectively harder to read is coming from. Actually, this is the first I've ever heard of the complaint. I can't help but wonder if you've been subjected to some very bad monospaced fonts in prose or something.
- mrob 5mo agoMonospace text is objectively less dense, which means you have to move your eyes more. Every eye movement is an opportunity for error. Monospace text only makes sense when seeing exact character counts matters (which it often does in computer code).
- applfanboysbgon 5mo agoOne could argue that less density, as well as standardised widths, significantly reduces opportunity for error compared to cluttered text that is constantly varying how it is displayed. Perhaps moving your eyes more increases opportunity for error by 10% but easier-to-parse characters decreases the opportunity for error by 20%?
- j2kun 5mo agoGenerally I just don't appreciate when someone jumps from "I care about this" to "everyone cares about this for obvious reasons." Focus on what something means to you, and being sincere about it. But that is just my advice for writing, take it or leave it. Also, are browser text area inputs monospaced by default for everyone? Or did I configure that for myself long ago and forget? If it's not just me, maybe the "reasons" you're alluding to are not so obvious. Anyway, I have no trouble at all reading the long comments I type into text areas. And more power to people for embracing agency :)
- userbinator 5mo agoThere's a reason we're not reading monospaced here You underestimate the number of HN users who are reading this site in their terminal. ;-)
- layer8 5mo agoTurn off syntax highlighting for your code, translate it to COBOL, and pass it through a formatter that converts it to continuous word-wrapped text. Then we’ll talk again.
- j2kun 5mo agoI have written multiple books entirely in LaTeX edited with neovim. So... your point is not taken.
- il-b 5mo agoThe dislike of code per se is what drives these people to use agents in the first place.
- kanbankaren 5mo agoSurprised that Monaspace hasn't been mentioned below. https://monaspace.githubnext.com/ https://monaspace.githubnext.com/
- richiebful1 5mo agoThere's limited research on readability of monospaced font. But this study suggests monospace is weakly more readable than variable-width font: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/2897736 https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/2897736
- jrm4 5mo agoNothing personal but I hate this take with a passion, and I literally think it's representative of the worst attitude in computing because it's the literal opposite of software SHOULD BE. The whole entire point of computers in their best light is changeable software, the whole point should be "let people read how they want to."