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by delta_p_delta_x 1488 days ago
> They have an interesting, unique style! The typography and punctuation are part of that style!

Her 'interesting, unique' 'typography and punctuation' makes me want to poke my eyes out instead of focusing on the content itself. You sneer at conventions, but they were developed after centuries of typesetting and typewriting.

Her entire style sheet is an abomination:

- The serif typeface she has used, EB Garamond, is best used for printed text. I am working on a 27" 1080p monitor, and the low DPI makes for very painful reading. Sans-serif humanist typefaces like Verdana (used at Hacker News, thank goodness) or Open Sans are best.

Better still, use the OS typeface in `font-family` (`-apple-system`, Segoe UI, SF Pro, Roboto, Lucida, Ubuntu, Open Sans, etc) instead of dragging in your own. If one so desperately wants a serif typeface, please use something that's nice and blocky, like Droid Serif or IBM Plex Serif.

Incidentally, I have the same qualms with the default typeface in LaTeX: the Computer Modern provided is far too spindly for digital reading. There is an alternative, MLModern[0] that is thicker, but it only has Type 1 glyphs rather than OpenType.

- The colours she has chosen are not as bad, but they are certainly distracting. Can't go wrong with a monochrome dark grey/white, or even straightforward black on white.

- Uppercase/lowercase letters and proper punctuation help break up the prose, and improve the reading experience by differentiating proper nouns, beginnings of sentences, etc etc. Dismissing this by saying 'Oooh, look at me, I'm different for different's sake' is just exasperating.

Incidentally, I'm probably of a similar age group as the writer, but I like to follow grammatical and typographical rules in long prose (I don't care as much in personal texts), because they make sense.

[0]: https://ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern?lang=en