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Programming With Proportional Fonts?

Posted by timothy on from the now-that's-wild-and-crazy dept.

theodp writes "Betty or Veronica? Mary Ann or Ginger? Proportional or Monospaced? There's renewed interest in an old blog post by Maas-Maarten Zeeman, in which M-MZ made the case for programming with proportional fonts, citing studies that show proportional fonts can be read 14% faster than fixed-width fonts. Try it for a couple of weeks, he suggests, and you might like it too. Nowadays, Lucida Grande is M-MZ's font of choice on OS X, and he uses Lucida Sans on Windows. Helvetica, anyone?"

2 of 394 comments (clear)

  1. Many years ago ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... /. had a thread very similar to this.

    And there were a lot of valuable inputs, like

    * 1. Make sure that the font's period (.) sign and the comman (,) sign is BIG, to aid in the debugging process.

    * 2. Color of the font and background must also complement each others. Too much contrast hurts the eyes. Too little will blur them up and make it hard to see.

    There are many other very useful pointers in that thread. If anyone can dig that thread up it would be very very useful for the new crop of programmers.

  2. Re:Monaco by psergiu · · Score: 5, Informative

    Monaco is one of them. 0 is slashed and 1, l, I and | are unique.

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