[creesch]

> typewritten mss (some with handwritten greek)

Not sure what you mean by that.

Also, just because you spend a lot of time reading information formatted with monospaced fonts doesn't mean they are the best way for you to receive that information.

[082349872349872]

They may not be the theoretical best way, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

If you have something to say, I have nothing against improving its typography.

If not, I'd argue for concentrating on spending effort finding, not a better typography, but better words.

:: :: ::

> Not sure what you mean by that.

Older research papers were often written with typewriters, leaving blank spots on the page for formulae, which were then (to a greater or lesser degree) put in in a second pass, with methods ranging from straight freehand to using drafting tools for lettering them.

eg (1951) https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand... p13

[creesch]

> They may not be the theoretical best way, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Sure, but this being the web and the font choice literally being one line of CSS it is not that hard to make things slightly better for everyone involved.

Even more so when a lot of the blogs I have in mind also try to appeal to a slightly broader audience than just the nerds used to monospaced fonts.

> Older research papers were often written with typewriters, leaving blank spots on the page for formulae,

Well, if you read them on paper it is a slightly different story. That is one of the main issues, fonts work differently on displays than on paper.

If you mean that you read these scanned papers, then I'd say that your argument mostly boils down to you being used to it by now. People can get used to a lot of things, to the point that they think they prefer it out of habit. That doesn't mean that they are actually better and can't be made better for other people starting out who are not used to these things.

[082349872349872]

See sibling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41383534

For instance, in this very convo what matters is that we're talking past each other, and I think that'd likely happen regardless of whether our comments were in fixed or proportional fonts, regardless of what other typographical choices might be made.

[creesch]

Well, you presented your use case as an "on the other hand" counter argument for me saying what sort of fonts generally work better. Which it isn't, it is just a specific use case where monospaced fonts happen to be used and it is difficult to change them.

That doesn't change the fact that in environments where there is control over all that monospaced fonts rarely are the best choice for large bodies of text.

[Clamchop]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say about TFA.

Where monospace was pragmatic for the typewriter era because of the limitations of the technology, proportional is the pragmatic _and default_ styling of the web.

Choosing monospace today for prose is an opinionated, and in my opinion suboptimal, choice.

[082349872349872]

For what I read, the limiting factor is how quickly and easily I can grok what they are trying to communicate, not how quickly and easily I may be able to apprehend the letterforms.

Sure, there are better typographical choices than monospace, but even bothering with that decision is like optimising a 2*x to an x<<1 in code that's hitting disk anyway.

(on the flip side: it doesn't matter how easy it is to read a sequence of words, or how beautiful they may be, if they don't communicate anything; the code analogy is that it doesn't matter how much faster a buggy change runs)

Does that make sense?