For a while I wondered why titles I set in serif fonts looked bad and then noticed that serif fonts seemed to be out of style in general.
Then I read a book that was set in an old version of Palatino where the serifs seemed to be making love to the curves of the letters around them and realized the problem was that most tools (Microsoft Powerpoint and Adobe Illustrator) don't do proper automatic kerning... Somebody must have gotten a patent that makes good kerning illegal. Now I manually kern serif titles and love the results but the experience makes me skeptical of serif fonts in a monospace context.
Ah, I meant full serif, no monospace. So the letters are using the serif spacing. You're right in that the kerning/spacing is what makes the difference here, I find words in serif much easier to read than their monospace counterparts when coding.
For a while I wondered why titles I set in serif fonts looked bad and then noticed that serif fonts seemed to be out of style in general.
Then I read a book that was set in an old version of Palatino where the serifs seemed to be making love to the curves of the letters around them and realized the problem was that most tools (Microsoft Powerpoint and Adobe Illustrator) don't do proper automatic kerning... Somebody must have gotten a patent that makes good kerning illegal. Now I manually kern serif titles and love the results but the experience makes me skeptical of serif fonts in a monospace context.