3 ms·

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. I've added an orthography toggle for those who prefer a more conventional look. I will add that I'm not very happy with the readab

by jaykru 18d ago

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. I've added an orthography toggle for those who prefer a more conventional look. I will add that I'm not very happy with the readability of my site overall at the moment; if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!

yshklarov 18d ago
Thanks! To expand a bit: It's clear from the writing that the formatting is an intentional stylistic choice. My point wasn't about aesthetic preference. I meant precisely what I wrote. Language evolves and orthography evolves. We've been capitalizing less and less for centuries now. But (until very recently) it was a universal rule to capitalize the first letters of sentences. I believe this is partly because (again, until very recently) people read in large quantities and, to a fluent reader, sentence capitalization serves an important purpose: it helps the eye recognize where one sentence ends and the next begins. Periods alone can be easy to miss, or confuse for commas, when the eye is moving quickly. Anyway, this is all a very minor point. You have a cool site and I enjoyed your article. I hope you keep writing.
gffrd 18d ago
> if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them! I'll play! My recommendation, in short: pick a new font, make the content pane narrower (around 75 characters per line), and increase line height by 15%. The font you use, Montserrat, has nice details, but they're extremely subtle, and our eye doesn't pick them up at text size.The font uses very pure geometry [1], has really big counters [2], is light in weight, and has no visible stroke contrast [3]. The effect when you look at the screen is that you see big blocks of text, but struggle to register individual characters, and it's hard to find the beginning of the next line. Add the lack of capitalization, and it feels like a monologue, like you're playing rubber-duck for someone. A challenge: everybody uses Google Fonts, and all the good fonts get used so heavily they end up losing their ability to make people feel something. Pick a font that is good [4] and feels comfortable to you. Ideally, buy one. You get what you pay for. And you go from being one of the millions of people who use a certain font to being one of fifteen. If you like the feel of Montserrat, Tiny Grotesk [5] and Decimal [6] would both be great choices and are from excellent type designers. Or browse Matthew Butterick's font recommendations [4]. They're good. You're out $50, but it's yours. If you're absolutely allergic to paying for fonts, DM Sans and Work Sans are Google Fonts, have a similar feel to Montserrat, and solve the above problems. But then you're a robot. A final note: Montserrat is actually a nice headline font. The details come into focus at larger sizes and weights. So I'm going to open a can of worms: you could pick a _contrasting_ body font. Remember PT Serif from the [3] footnote? Try it on for size. ---- [1] By that, I mean things like: an "o" looks like a perfect circle rather than an oblique oval, and forms are strictly on 90º axes. [2] Counters are the apertures of letters, the open center of an "o" being one. [3] This is the contrast in "line" size. Think of it like the width of the line when you write with a chisel-tip marker: some lines end up thinner, some thicker. Look at the "e" on the font PT Serif - the vertical walls of the character are thicker, horizontal thinner. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=Serif%3A%2FSerif%2F*%2C%2FSlab%2F* https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=S... [4] You can't go wrong with anything Matthew Butterick recommends (https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html), or from any of the "big" font foundries: Hoefler & Co., Linotype, Monotype, Berthold, URW. If it's a bestseller on myfonts, it's a sure choice: https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller [5] https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk [6] https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and-co https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and...
- ashton314 18d ago
  Ah, fellow Butterick fonts enjoyer—Butterick's fonts have spoiled me: compared to pretty much every other professional font I've seen, they're the cheapest and most conveniently licensed fonts out there.
xdennis 18d ago
What is the logic behind transforming `FreeBSD RCEs` to `freebsd RCEs`? If what you're trying to communicate is that, like Sam Altman, you're too cool the press the shift key, then why write some initialisms in upper case? After all, there is a style of acronyms that are always written in lower case: Latin ones ("i.e.", "e.g.")
ashton314 18d ago
Someone has already mentioned Matthew Butterick's fonts and his online "book" Practical Typography [1]—absolutely fantastic material there. Some concrete suggestions from me: - Fira Sans [2] is a lovely, legible sans-serif font that's free and incredibly easy-to-read. This would make a fine body font. - Source Sans [3] is another good sans-serif that might be closer to your current font. It's about as readable as Fira, but it's a little less warm imo. - Make your line length a little narrower and your line spacing (i.e. leading) just a hair wider—that will do wonders for readability. Definitely check out Practical Typography for more tips from a real professional. Thanks for the blog post! [1]: https://practicaltypography.com/ https://practicaltypography.com/ [2]: https://carrois.com/fira/ https://carrois.com/fira/ [3]: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans
BeetleB 18d ago
OK, I'll be that guy: Since you are willing to consult LLMs for reviewing your post, why not ask them for feedback on improving the CSS, etc?
malcolmgreaves 18d ago
The biggest improvement to readability is to capitalize the beginning of sentences. There’s no need for a toggle. Don’t default to making your writing unreadable, please.
daleswanson 17d ago
FWIW, I too found it harder to read without capitalization. Came here, read through comments, saw this comment, thought "Oh I didn't see a toggle, did they just add it literally while I was reading?". Went back to the site and realized the toggle was the "orthography mode: based|cringe" bit, which I would have never realized would do that.

by jaykru 18d ago

yshklarov 18d ago

Thanks! To expand a bit: It's clear from the writing that the formatting is an intentional stylistic choice. My point wasn't about aesthetic preference. I meant precisely what I wrote. Language evolves and orthography evolves. We've been capitalizing less and less for centuries now. But (until very recently) it was a universal rule to capitalize the first letters of sentences. I believe this is partly because (again, until very recently) people read in large quantities and, to a fluent reader, sentence capitalization serves an important purpose: it helps the eye recognize where one sentence ends and the next begins. Periods alone can be easy to miss, or confuse for commas, when the eye is moving quickly. Anyway, this is all a very minor point. You have a cool site and I enjoyed your article. I hope you keep writing.

gffrd 18d ago

> if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them! I'll play! My recommendation, in short: pick a new font, make the content pane narrower (around 75 characters per line), and increase line height by 15%. The font you use, Montserrat, has nice details, but they're extremely subtle, and our eye doesn't pick them up at text size.The font uses very pure geometry [1], has really big counters [2], is light in weight, and has no visible stroke contrast [3]. The effect when you look at the screen is that you see big blocks of text, but struggle to register individual characters, and it's hard to find the beginning of the next line. Add the lack of capitalization, and it feels like a monologue, like you're playing rubber-duck for someone. A challenge: everybody uses Google Fonts, and all the good fonts get used so heavily they end up losing their ability to make people feel something. Pick a font that is good [4] and feels comfortable to you. Ideally, buy one. You get what you pay for. And you go from being one of the millions of people who use a certain font to being one of fifteen. If you like the feel of Montserrat, Tiny Grotesk [5] and Decimal [6] would both be great choices and are from excellent type designers. Or browse Matthew Butterick's font recommendations [4]. They're good. You're out $50, but it's yours. If you're absolutely allergic to paying for fonts, DM Sans and Work Sans are Google Fonts, have a similar feel to Montserrat, and solve the above problems. But then you're a robot. A final note: Montserrat is actually a nice headline font. The details come into focus at larger sizes and weights. So I'm going to open a can of worms: you could pick a _contrasting_ body font. Remember PT Serif from the [3] footnote? Try it on for size. ---- [1] By that, I mean things like: an "o" looks like a perfect circle rather than an oblique oval, and forms are strictly on 90º axes. [2] Counters are the apertures of letters, the open center of an "o" being one. [3] This is the contrast in "line" size. Think of it like the width of the line when you write with a chisel-tip marker: some lines end up thinner, some thicker. Look at the "e" on the font PT Serif - the vertical walls of the character are thicker, horizontal thinner. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=Serif%3A%2FSerif%2F*%2C%2FSlab%2F* https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=S... [4] You can't go wrong with anything Matthew Butterick recommends (https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html), or from any of the "big" font foundries: Hoefler & Co., Linotype, Monotype, Berthold, URW. If it's a bestseller on myfonts, it's a sure choice: https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller [5] https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk [6] https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and-co https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and...

ashton314 18d ago
Ah, fellow Butterick fonts enjoyer—Butterick's fonts have spoiled me: compared to pretty much every other professional font I've seen, they're the cheapest and most conveniently licensed fonts out there.

xdennis 18d ago

What is the logic behind transforming `FreeBSD RCEs` to `freebsd RCEs`? If what you're trying to communicate is that, like Sam Altman, you're too cool the press the shift key, then why write some initialisms in upper case? After all, there is a style of acronyms that are always written in lower case: Latin ones ("i.e.", "e.g.")

ashton314 18d ago

Someone has already mentioned Matthew Butterick's fonts and his online "book" Practical Typography [1]—absolutely fantastic material there. Some concrete suggestions from me: - Fira Sans [2] is a lovely, legible sans-serif font that's free and incredibly easy-to-read. This would make a fine body font. - Source Sans [3] is another good sans-serif that might be closer to your current font. It's about as readable as Fira, but it's a little less warm imo. - Make your line length a little narrower and your line spacing (i.e. leading) just a hair wider—that will do wonders for readability. Definitely check out Practical Typography for more tips from a real professional. Thanks for the blog post! [1]: https://practicaltypography.com/ https://practicaltypography.com/ [2]: https://carrois.com/fira/ https://carrois.com/fira/ [3]: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans

BeetleB 18d ago

OK, I'll be that guy: Since you are willing to consult LLMs for reviewing your post, why not ask them for feedback on improving the CSS, etc?

malcolmgreaves 18d ago

The biggest improvement to readability is to capitalize the beginning of sentences. There’s no need for a toggle. Don’t default to making your writing unreadable, please.

daleswanson 17d ago

FWIW, I too found it harder to read without capitalization. Came here, read through comments, saw this comment, thought "Oh I didn't see a toggle, did they just add it literally while I was reading?". Went back to the site and realized the toggle was the "orthography mode: based|cringe" bit, which I would have never realized would do that.