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by applfanboysbgon 40 days ago
> a reason we're not reading monospaced here

Legacy decisions as a remnant from a time when taking more space on paper cost pages and therefore resources, remaining as a default from centuries of inertia in how text is printed?
1 comments
tptacek 40 days ago
No, prose set in monospace is harder to read. The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working.

But seriously: you do you. There are people who code in proportional typefaces and they're as baffling to me as you are right now. Let a thousand Markdown viewers bloom.

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applfanboysbgon 40 days ago
> The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working.

The legacy is proportional, at least in Latin script and its ancestors. Handwriting was proportional, of course, and so was Gutenberg's printing press. Books and newspapers have virtually always been printed in proportional type.

In Chinese and Japanese, monospace is legacy in both handwriting and print... and also still universally used today. All Chinese and Japanese text is monospaced by default. Billions of people are getting by just fine reading monospaced prose.

I don't really know where this conception that monospaced is somehow objectively harder to read is coming from. Actually, this is the first I've ever heard of the complaint. I can't help but wonder if you've been subjected to some very bad monospaced fonts in prose or something.

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mrob 40 days ago
Monospace text is objectively less dense, which means you have to move your eyes more. Every eye movement is an opportunity for error. Monospace text only makes sense when seeing exact character counts matters (which it often does in computer code).
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applfanboysbgon 40 days ago
One could argue that less density, as well as standardised widths, significantly reduces opportunity for error compared to cluttered text that is constantly varying how it is displayed. Perhaps moving your eyes more increases opportunity for error by 10% but easier-to-parse characters decreases the opportunity for error by 20%?
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