In search of the perfect writing font
ia.net
ia.net
I have a (rather lazy) friend who's been asking me to help him start a blog for years now. I've promised to after he produces his first block of content, and he keeps saying he can't write if he doesn't feel the design is aesthetically pleasing. If he'd spent his time writing instead of worrying about this, he'd have a crappy initial draft, several revised drafts, and probably something decent by now. But no, that prohibitively unattractive font!
It was nice of iA to write this up, and design posts are a fun read, but does anyone who's busy actually writing care about this?
(FWIW that's PT Mono for the last few months, after almost a decade of using Ubuntu Mono exclusively.)
Honestly, I think I have about six hours of full-concentration work in me in a typical day. Less, if it's mentally demanding work. Sometimes, the best thing I can do for a project is take a walk, or let it rest for a bit and let my subconscious keep churning on it.
I'd suggest that the friend write his first post in Word or somesuch with a font that he likes. Then, when he has a good first post, export it to the blog.
I then tried LaTeX and all problems vanished. Since I could not influence the output (at least without a lot of work) I simply gave up and started to "code my text". It was way faster than admiring my artful working all the time, I just complied the text from time to time and I was done.
This is how I see Markdown today.
I believe that Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle concept of minimising the time between having an idea and seeing a change universally applies to every user kind of interface.
I'm going to move to WordPress and be done with it. No I won't have faster than lightning page loads anymore, but it'll be much lower friction to publish something.
Dual space fonts look and feel good for me, but I'm not sure if they have any value. Even aesthetic value may wear off and be just novelty.
I don't know what it is about it, but it just looks right.
(It probably has a lot to do with the date of my birth, but then again... who cares why something feels right, when it does?)
I wish its usage would spread to other fonts. It's probably a lot of work to implement though.
[0] https://medium.com/larsenwork-andreas-larsen/class-based-con...
The author uses the phrase "duospace" font a dozen times before actually explaining what it is: a mostly monospace font. I find it ironic that an article about perfecting the art of writing is so devoid of content. Did we really need 3 pages of justification for a big reveal of... a font specimen?
It makes things like i, j and space narrower, rather than things like w and m wider as this article discusses. I reckon narrowing some yields a more pleasing result than widening some.
Triplicate Poly does make the 'm' and 'w' characters a little wider, too, although not by the same amount. It's a true proportional font rather than "duospace."
While Linux handles this fine, Windows requires replacing Segoe UI at the registry level in order to fully change over.
The downside is that an unusual renderings (e.g. Font size 17), they don't look great, but it's a small price to pay.
I tend to like monospace fonts with a bit more rounded corners, which to me gives them a bit more "character" (one could almost say quirkyness) and readability.
good examples of this would be Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Monaco and to a lesser extent, Iosevka
Eye strain will be notably reduced if you move the display 3 feet away from your eyes (requires less convergence and less accommodation), and at that distance 220 ppi starts to have pixels that are close to indistinguishable, even for folks with 20/20 vision.
So i get the best results by sitting closer to the monitor. I want to be able to see the pixels and have screen real estate, so i use a 27" 1920x1080 monitor (LG... something, i don't remember the model, although TBH i'd prefer to use a smaller monitor with a smaller resolution, but any panel with a lower resolution than 1920x1080 has awful image quality and personally i see even IPS panels as a step backwards compared to my Sony CRT and cannot wait for OLED panels... hopefully in sane sizes and DPI). I also have a 2560x1440 monitor (Dell U2713HM) which i bought after seeing several artists at a previous job use it and liking the image quality, but i have stopped using it both because things are a bit too tiny for my taste and because in high end games my GPU (GTX 980) starts to struggle a bit unless i lower the settings considerably. Although TBH often i prefer to play games in a window so i can have some stuff still visible around (especially in Window Maker, my WM of choice, which is generally distraction free) and with 2560x1440 i can use 1920x1080 for the window resolution which often matches the UI scale the game uses but with 1920x1080 as the native resolution i need to use something smaller like 1600x900 which often crushes the UI, making it blurry. But that is a small price to play.
But FWIW, i don't mind antialiased fonts even though bitmaps do indeed look much crisper to me too.
It's also highly customizable.
¹ https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/
white on black paragraph sample: http://malea.lacerta.uberspace.de/up/11a0e427-7717-4f25-a74d...
For programming, "duospace" works exactly like any other proportional font. The fact that some letters have the same width doesn't buy you anything in terms of alignment. Unless your style guide forbids the letters "m" and "w" in method names. ;)
I do not know of any monospaced fonts that include U+FDFD. I’m not at all sure what they would do with it.
What I find particularly amusing about U+FDFD is the broad range of widths and styles it can take. I see three wildly differing styles depending on the font employed (two long ones and one roughly square one).
(When herein I say “terminals” I mean “terminals/renderers/text editors/things like that”.)
Some terminals are truly monospace, simply not drawing glyphs that aren’t available at the right size (e.g. xterm).
Some terminals don’t actually care about being monospaced all that much, and are quite happy to handle glyphs of differing sizes, though up/down movements may still be character-based (e.g. Notepad++).
Some terminals try hard to both be monospaced and show you useful stuff, and will either horizontally truncate the glyph, or draw subsequent glyphs on top of any overflow (e.g. gVim).
Some terminals simply make a total hash of it, with the cursor positioning being monospaced, but drawing subsequent characters after the incorrectly-wide glyph (e.g. Ace).
Your example of U+FDFD is bonus fun because it’s RTL. Most terminals don’t handle RTL at all well. (Terminals capable of proportional rendering such as Notepad++ and plain old Notepad are much more likely to treat it properly in my experience.)
As I mentioned, my terminal emulator uses bitmap fonts. Whilst bitmap fonts do have a mechanism of specifying either single-width or double-width characters, it ignores that and displays everything in the same width, rescaling everything with some slight special-casing of block graphic and horizontally repeatable characters. So whilst by the looks of the amount of detail in the glyph on screen, U+FDFD is a double-width character in the font file; it occupies a single column.
See the "Fonts" section of http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/console-fb-realizer.ht...
I am currently using a mixture of monospace bitmap fonts that I have obtained from various places:
--vtfont-normal-i fonts/t0-16i-unicode.fnt --vtfont fonts/9x15.fnt --vtfont fonts/k16-1990.fnt --vtfont fonts/unifont-7.0.06.fnt
The visual design of the letterforms and spacing of text is a typeface, not a font. A font is the delivery vehicle for a typeface -- it's a file format.
This comes from letterpress days where “font” referred to a collection of lead characters of a given typeface, weight, and size.
One definition it font is as described above. Another, as defined by usage, is as the original author used
I’ll stick with 8x13.
For reading, I’ve come to admire Amazon’s new fonts: Bookerly, Ember, and Interface.
But I also find myself going back to good ‘ol Times New Roman for writing and reading most things. Runner-up: Georgia.
Other interesting serif fonts include:
Adobe Caslon Pro (used by The New Yorker) ITC Galliard (used by Library of America)
It's not a bad writing experience though.