[usually]

It looks nice, and I'm glad that it's semantic and responsive, but the fundamental problem is that monospace just isn't great for body text. I've read blog posts on multiple sites with monospaced body text, it's okay, but proportional really is the way to go in my opinion.

[marcus_holmes]

I think I prefer monospaced. I certainly prefer the white-on-black colour scheme.

I definitely prefer this to the "beautiful" pages that try to capture the feel of old print magazines.

[pistoleer]

I think any heavily stylized text (that includes terminalesque sites) takes extra cognitive effort to read. Sometimes it's best to just leave it plain, and have it be elegant through being easy to read.

[layer8]

Agreed. It has started bothering me for authoring Markdown documents as well, where it’s often impractical to avoid monospace.

[notpushkin]

I like monospace for writing Markdown. I can't point finger on why exactly, but it feels like a manuscript or something. (Although iA folks have quantified this a bit: https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font)

Conversely, for reading Markdown, I prefer a rendered version in a proportional font.

[cpach]

Some Markdown editors defaults to using a proportional type face for body text. Quite nice! Typora is one of them, there are probably others.

https://typora.io/

[0xEF]

Out of curiosity, what font would you prefer for body text? I use monospace on my own blog because it plays nice with my poor vision and scaling settings, but I am always curious about improved readability for all, since accesability is important to me.

[upofadown]

I think it depends on what you mean by "readability". Proportional squeezes more text into the same space. So you get more of it per eye fixation and as a result can read faster and/or exert less effort for the same amount of text. Monospaced puts everything in a grid and makes it easier to distinguish one character from another. So you get fewer errors due to the characters bleeding into one another. So mono works better when legibility is an issue.

So both have better "readability" in different ways. Faster/easier or more accurate. Which implies to me at least that mono is better for everything but body text even when things are ideal. I don't think it is possible to have a single proportional font that works for both definitions of the word "readability".

[creesch]

Most research points to sans serif fonts working best for large bodies of text on most screens. So simply good old Arial or Verdana actually is a very safe choice (though a bit boring) choice which will cover the greatest audience.

On modern high density displays serif fonts can also work fine. But not all displays out there are actually of that high density.

That's just one aspect though. There has been a lot of research over the years which for some reason is often ignored.

I was about to write out a lot more and while looking up various sources stumbled upon a medium post that dives into things quite deeply: https://medium.com/@pvermaer/down-the-font-legibility-rabbit...