[masukomi]

Dear Geeks with interesting things to say on your blog:

Please, for sake of the people you want to hear your words. DO NOT USE A SANS SERIF MONOSPACED FONT FOR ANYTHING BUT CODE.

I get it. We stare at text (code) formatted in this kind of font all day long, and many of us find fonts that we truly enjoy. But, most of our monospace sans-serif fonts are designed to make sure individual characters aren't misread. We don't read prose the same way we read code. There is far more pattern recognition going on than actual parsing of individual letters, and monospaced fonts break that. We can debate the aesthetics of serifs but they actually do help provide context clues to the pattern recognition systems in our brain.

Convincing you all to start using serif fonts on prose is not a battle i'm likely to win, but maybe I can convince you to only use monospaced fonts for your terminal, and your code.

Please.

[weinzierl]

You exaggerate the issue. Proportional fonts were a necessity when lead, ink and paper were expensive. In lead typesetting they are easy to do. This caused the success of newspaper fonts like Times New Roman.

Contemporary fonts have much less variance in the width of characters, except for a couple of outliers like the i. From there to a completely monospaced font is not as big a leap as you make it seem. For me, I'm fine with monospaced fonts for prose.

[TylerE]

Disagree. Reading monospaced prose sucks big time. For those of us with a little bit of vision deficiency the vary character widths are helpful.

Also, the reduced character width (as a monospaced font inevitable has to be spaced at what the widest chatacters, such as w, require, means that you have to use a smaller font size to get the same amount of info per scroll/line/page whatever, again compromising readability.

Here's a comparison between the posted site, and the same site with the font size bumped up 4px, proportional (just browser default, I didn't cherry pick) and the ridiculously wide line spacing reduced.

Even with all that, the easier to read version is quite a bit more compact. Could likely bump the font size 2 more px and still be smaller.

https://i.imgur.com/DBFI2RU.png

[ltbarcly3]

I'm surprised when people notice fonts. If the font is weird, or very decorative then sure, I would notice a font in Papyrus or Comic Sans. On my kindle I set it to the modern sans sarif font because its easier to read, for me. If there was no option to change the font I probably wouldn't have noticed, though.

I don't want say this in a way that comes off as insulting, but I'll just say it and please don't take it as a put down: if my kid came to me and expressed this much frustration and difficulty because of a sans sarif or monospaced font I would be concerned they had a problem with their vision or an issue processing what they saw, and I might research and/or take them to get checked out.

[wheels]

I wouldn't be bothered about it in this case (I'm much more offended when the font size or margins are stupid), but to use your phrase "I don't want say this in a way that comes off as insulting, but I'll just say it and please don't take it as a put down..."

You probably just don't have a strong sense of aesthetics. Some people notice design-y stuff and some people don't. A lot of people do notice fonts, or misaligned margins, or whatever. And a lot of people don't. The latter category are probably never going to be good designers or artists or whatever. People are different.

[ltbarcly3]

You are right, while I might notice that sort of thing you mention it wouldn't distract me much. There are other things that completely make it impossible for me to function, like direct lighting in or near my field of view. I could claim like you do that people who have a bright light bulb hanging right next to their tv are just blind to some deeper experience, but probably they just aren't bothered by it.

What makes you think these proclivities about font choice are universal then? Maybe you are just insisting on what you find aesthetically appealing, while many people would equally validly feel the opposite?

[wheels]

Fixed width fonts have a special purpose. They're designed to fill that purpose, not to be optimal for other things.

There's an age-old debate of how much "good taste" is subjective, but in this particular case, it's someone hammering a nail in with a wrench. Some will be bothered, others not, but it's definitely the wrong tool for the job.

The example of not liking lights in certain places isn't a very good one. It's an attempt to elide all "things people don't like" into subjectivity, but there are actually things that are better and worse. You would agree that website design can be better or worse, right? And that some people would have a better eye for good or bad design? With me so far? I'm saying you're probably not one of the people out on the end of the spectrum that's best able to recognize good and bad in design, but I hope you recognize that good and bad design exist, and that people vary in their ability to recognize it.

[ltbarcly3]

I want to say to you, in earnest, things will get better and a bad period in your life will almost always unexpectedly improve sooner than you would think.

[wheels]

This an extremely weird passive-aggressive flex. The thread basically went, "I think people that notice font problems have something wrong with them." To which I respond, "No, designers and design-y people notice stuff like that." And then to go from there to this is pretty, bwah?

[glitcher]

Sentences in all caps are much worse IMO.

[colesantiago]

Just use reader mode?

All modern browsers have this.