
In search of the perfect writing font - ingve
https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font/
======
brandonhsiao
I used to tell myself I couldn't code or write without the perfect font. I'd
spend hours looking for it, and end up not getting any work done. When I
finally did get around to actually working, five minutes in and I'd forget
about the font completely.

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?

~~~
pgt
I recently converted my dynamic DB-driven blog to a static website. I did not
predict how badly the added latency between having an idea, writing down the
first flawed paragraph, saving a draft, reading what I wrote, then revising
and publishing would reduce my writing output. Sure, I can write in Google
Docs, but because it's not on my site one click away from being "out there" I
am far less compelled to write down my fleeting ideas. Over time I have
learned that fleeting ideas are the best ones because they exist at the limit
of your understanding. Maybe if you help set up his blog, he'll be more likely
to write?

~~~
BrandoElFollito
I had the opposite feeling. I wrote my PhD thesis in 1998-2000 and the editor
of choice at the time was Word. It was a pain to deal with the formatting,
spacing, page breaking and other -ings.

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.

~~~
pgt
Markdown is a must. I used it on dynamic blog and on my static site, but I
paid less attention to my writing when posts were not "live".

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.

------
vanderZwan
If you want a blog post about actual innovation with monospaced fonts, try
_Class Based Contextual Positioning in MonoSpaced Fonts_ by Andreas Larsen,
which is used in his Monoid font[0][1]. It also deals with this problem of
characters not having the same natural width, but in a way that actually
preserves the monospace characteristic.

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...](https://medium.com/larsenwork-andreas-larsen/class-based-contextual-
positioning-in-monospaced-fonts-cb6b8b9ffe6f)

[1] [http://larsenwork.com/monoid/](http://larsenwork.com/monoid/)

------
throwaway284534
Despite this article's length, there isn't a single full text example.

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?

------
chrismorgan
For the last couple of years I’ve been using Triplicate as my standard
monospace font, and it has a Poly variant which is proportional and works
really well for code presentation (provided you aren’t trying to line things
up with spaces).

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.

[http://triplicatefont.com/](http://triplicatefont.com/)

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I'm also using Triplicate for a lot of writing. I switch between Triplicate
Code and Font Bureau's free Input Mono family for coding (and console
display), but Triplicate Poly is terrific for prose writing. I suppose I feel
some of the same psychological "draft vs. final" reasons that iA talks about
in the linked article, but I just don't like iA's font choices very much.

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."

------
BVthrowaway
This view seems to have fallen to the wayside, but I vehemently prefer
rasterized / bitmapped fonts. Every type of font smoothing looks blurry to me
and causes eye strain. Of course, very few modern fonts look good without
smoothing - only a few of the old standbys (Arial, etc...) have usable
bitmapped versions.

While Linux handles this fine, Windows requires replacing Segoe UI at the
registry level in order to fully change over.

~~~
shpx
What are your favorite fonts?

~~~
Retr0spectrum
Personally, I use Terminus in my text editor and terminal. Bitmap fonts just
look much crisper and cleaner to me.

~~~
platz
I have found that I dislike fonts that have overly squared-off corners, in
which all the letters look so uniform. So, I just don't understand the appeal
a lot of boutique "programming" fonts like proggy or monoid.

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

------
anotheryou
I can recommend Iosevka¹. It looks a bit condensed, which takes time getting
used to, but after that you have the benefit of monospaced, without it being
so wide.

It's also highly customizable.

¹ [https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/](https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/)

white on black paragraph sample:
[http://malea.lacerta.uberspace.de/up/11a0e427-7717-4f25-a74d...](http://malea.lacerta.uberspace.de/up/11a0e427-7717-4f25-a74d-7dcad933e0d0.png)

~~~
platz
I switched to Iosevka for terminal can't stop using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
(or Monaco) for code editors, though

------
codeflo
The goal here seems to be to have that "typewritery" look that people
associate with writing drafts, but add a bit more readability than is possible
in a monospace font. Fair enough, though I'm not sure why having exactly two
character widths is preferable to having three, or five, or simply designing a
proportional font with wider typewriter-style characters.

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. ;)

------
erokar
I disagree with iA'a philosophy. I like to write fiction with proportional
serif fonts, often quite similar to fonts that would be used in print.
Sometimes I change fonts to defamiliarize the text, which helps me read it
with fresh eyes. The last couple years I've mostly been using the Mate font.
[https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/mate](https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/mate)

~~~
s4vi0r
I don't know why, but that font is giving me some serious comic sans ms vibes.

~~~
anotheryou
it's not meant to be blown up. Look at the paragraph examples in the
"specimen" tab. It looks really tidy in smaller size.

------
chrismorgan
Fun fact that people may not be aware of: not all glyphs in monospace fonts
are actually the same width (provided the font supports enough of Unicode).
Some glyphs are twice as wide, such as CJK/fullwidth characters in general.
The Unicode standard includes a list of codepoint column widths—some zero
(e.g. combining characters), some one, some two, some one or two depending on
the context (the language).

~~~
adzicg
a lovely example is uFDFD, ﷽ (single char)

~~~
chrismorgan
I am referring to Annex #11 (East Asian Width) of the Unicode Standard, which
is all about CJK. Under those rules, U+FDFD is one column wide. If you happen
to see it rendering really wide in the middle of text set in a monospaced
typeface, it’s probably because a fallback font is being employed. In one
arrangement locally I see it as eleven-and-a-bit columns, because it’s using
it from another font; in another which sticks stringently to actual columns
and doesn’t use fallbacks at all, it’s one-column-wide blank.

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).

~~~
JdeBP
My terminal displays it just fine, so it must be in at least one of the bitmap
monospace fonts that I have configured it with.

~~~
chrismorgan
That doesn’t mean it’s being rendered monospace.

(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.)

~~~
JdeBP
Yes it does. I wrote the terminal program. I know what it does with fonts.

~~~
chrismorgan
I’m curious: how many columns is it occupying? From all that I can see, it
should be a single column, with the font incapable of overriding that.

~~~
JdeBP
I can tell you that terminal emulator is finding the character in the fonts
that I have configured it with. But it won't tell you the stuff about
character widths that you want to know, I suspect.

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...](http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/console-fb-
realizer.html)

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
    

So U+FDFD is somewhere in those. (-:

------
couchand
It's painful to see an article this long discussing typefaces in detail that
uses the word font incorrectly so many times. In casual usage I let the
mistake by, but the author of this article really should know better.

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.

~~~
GuiA
A typeface is the design, a font is a specific incarnation of it. Helvetica
Bold 12pt and Helvetica 18pt are two different fonts from the same typeface,
Helvetica.

This comes from letterpress days where “font” referred to a collection of lead
characters of a given typeface, weight, and size.

~~~
altair11
No, couchand is right. Now a font is the file (you're almost right on it’s
origin, it originates from steel punchcutting where each point size did need
it’s own font). So a font is helvetica-bold.otf not Helvetica Bold. Helvetica
Bold is a weight of Helvetica. (All of this is likely to alter slightly though
with the advent of variable fonts.)

~~~
stestagg
Except, arguably he’s also wrong.

One definition it font is as described above. Another, as defined by usage, is
as the original author used

------
ChrisSD
The best font is the one you're most used to. When I've been involved with
people testing their new "greatest ever" font, their user testing always shows
people have a strong preference for what they're familiar with. Even if that's
Arial or Comic Sans.

------
osrec
As someone who has often spent hours readjusting fonts on their documents/apps
to achieve the correct feel, it's somewhat comforting to know that there are
people out there who take this obsession to whole new level!

~~~
joering2
I don't think its about obsession. Most fonts I tried I could not read or
write code. I settled to amazing Adobe Source Code Pro Semi-light, but time to
time Notepad++ resets it to default which immediately bothers my eyes. Adobe
came with wonderful font, and its free!

~~~
osrec
I just checked it out on github - that is indeed a nice font for development.

------
akuri
With a 50% width space option, the duospace approach might be usable for
“pedantic” code indentation (that is indentation beyond just nesting, but also
vertically aligning elements other than the start)

~~~
brians
Exactly. But without that, midline alignment is shot.

I’ll stick with 8x13.

------
miobrien
For coding, anything like Menlo, Consolas seems to do the trick.

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)

------
baruchel
Another attempt for a quite similar idea is Cartograph
[http://connary.com/cartograph.html](http://connary.com/cartograph.html)

------
Quanttek
The author claims that monospace fonts are better for writing (while
proportional fonts are better for reading). Is there any research to actually
support this central claim?

------
d--b
I think iA's deal is to simulate a typewriter. It's a hipster's thing. Like
obsessing on font design.

It's not a bad writing experience though.

------
jasonjei
There’s also the question of the perfect writing font for non-Roman languages,
such as CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), Arabic, Greek, etc.

------
mark-r
The ink traps in IA 735 are pure ugliness at large font sizes. They're totally
unnecessary unless you're printing with actual ink!

~~~
mark-r
For those that might be confused by what I mean:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap)

