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Post Made Community Wiki by user1228
New point: Context-sensitive indentation.
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Konrad Rudolph
Konrad Rudolph
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I've become curious by this thread because many arguments for monospaced fonts can really be rebutted easily with some tweaking. So I switched my IDE to Calibri (because it has a nice, round face and is optimized for readability on screens for UI – perfect). Now I obviously have to use tabs instead spaces for indentation (ignoring all the problems) and 4 spaces width is clearly not enough so I switched to 10.

Looks quite good now. However, there are a few obvious problems that I could spot. More might surface later, after I've tested this settings for a while.

  • As already mentioned, some characters (especially parenthesises, semi-colons) look much too thin. I want this in a continuous text but not in a source code. I think this will be the biggest problem.

  • Symbols don't align well. As an example, consider the following C# code:

      var expr = x => x + 1;

    The arrow (=>) looks like a unit in about any monospace font. It looks like two adjacent characters in other fonts. The same is true for operators like >> etc.

  • Spaces look tiny. I space my source codes vigorously to enhance readability. This comes to naught when switching to a proportional font. If I could control the width of spaces this would definitely help.

  • Context-sensitive indentation is completely broken: in some contexts it's not enough to indentate a fixed number of tabs. Take LINQ expressions which might be indented in the following way:

      var r = from c in "This, apparently, is a test!"
          where !char.IsPunctuation(c)
          select char.ToUpper(c);

    You simply can't do this with a proportional font.

All in all, characters are too narrow. Again, an additional letter-spacing might help and it's definitely necessary in the case of punctiuation. However, I've got the feeling that all this tweaking to make proportional fonts more readable would just emulate what monospaced fonts to naturally. It's certainly true for all the points mentioned so far.

I've become curious by this thread because many arguments for monospaced fonts can really be rebutted easily with some tweaking. So I switched my IDE to Calibri (because it has a nice, round face and is optimized for readability on screens for UI – perfect). Now I obviously have to use tabs instead spaces for indentation (ignoring all the problems) and 4 spaces width is clearly not enough so I switched to 10.

Looks quite good now. However, there are a few obvious problems that I could spot. More might surface later, after I've tested this settings for a while.

  • As already mentioned, some characters (especially parenthesises, semi-colons) look much too thin. I want this in a continuous text but not in a source code. I think this will be the biggest problem.

  • Symbols don't align well. As an example, consider the following C# code:

      var expr = x => x + 1;

    The arrow (=>) looks like a unit in about any monospace font. It looks like two adjacent characters in other fonts. The same is true for operators like >> etc.

  • Spaces look tiny. I space my source codes vigorously to enhance readability. This comes to naught when switching to a proportional font. If I could control the width of spaces this would definitely help.

All in all, characters are too narrow. Again, an additional letter-spacing might help and it's definitely necessary in the case of punctiuation. However, I've got the feeling that all this tweaking to make proportional fonts more readable would just emulate what monospaced fonts to naturally. It's certainly true for all the points mentioned so far.

I've become curious by this thread because many arguments for monospaced fonts can really be rebutted easily with some tweaking. So I switched my IDE to Calibri (because it has a nice, round face and is optimized for readability on screens for UI – perfect). Now I obviously have to use tabs instead spaces for indentation (ignoring all the problems) and 4 spaces width is clearly not enough so I switched to 10.

Looks quite good now. However, there are a few obvious problems that I could spot. More might surface later, after I've tested this settings for a while.

  • As already mentioned, some characters (especially parenthesises, semi-colons) look much too thin. I want this in a continuous text but not in a source code. I think this will be the biggest problem.

  • Symbols don't align well. As an example, consider the following C# code:

      var expr = x => x + 1;

    The arrow (=>) looks like a unit in about any monospace font. It looks like two adjacent characters in other fonts. The same is true for operators like >> etc.

  • Spaces look tiny. I space my source codes vigorously to enhance readability. This comes to naught when switching to a proportional font. If I could control the width of spaces this would definitely help.

  • Context-sensitive indentation is completely broken: in some contexts it's not enough to indentate a fixed number of tabs. Take LINQ expressions which might be indented in the following way:

      var r = from c in "This, apparently, is a test!"
          where !char.IsPunctuation(c)
          select char.ToUpper(c);

    You simply can't do this with a proportional font.

All in all, characters are too narrow. Again, an additional letter-spacing might help and it's definitely necessary in the case of punctiuation. However, I've got the feeling that all this tweaking to make proportional fonts more readable would just emulate what monospaced fonts to naturally. It's certainly true for all the points mentioned so far.

Source Link
Konrad Rudolph
Konrad Rudolph
  • 548.9k
  • 142
  • 964
  • 1.3k

I've become curious by this thread because many arguments for monospaced fonts can really be rebutted easily with some tweaking. So I switched my IDE to Calibri (because it has a nice, round face and is optimized for readability on screens for UI – perfect). Now I obviously have to use tabs instead spaces for indentation (ignoring all the problems) and 4 spaces width is clearly not enough so I switched to 10.

Looks quite good now. However, there are a few obvious problems that I could spot. More might surface later, after I've tested this settings for a while.

  • As already mentioned, some characters (especially parenthesises, semi-colons) look much too thin. I want this in a continuous text but not in a source code. I think this will be the biggest problem.

  • Symbols don't align well. As an example, consider the following C# code:

      var expr = x => x + 1;

    The arrow (=>) looks like a unit in about any monospace font. It looks like two adjacent characters in other fonts. The same is true for operators like >> etc.

  • Spaces look tiny. I space my source codes vigorously to enhance readability. This comes to naught when switching to a proportional font. If I could control the width of spaces this would definitely help.

All in all, characters are too narrow. Again, an additional letter-spacing might help and it's definitely necessary in the case of punctiuation. However, I've got the feeling that all this tweaking to make proportional fonts more readable would just emulate what monospaced fonts to naturally. It's certainly true for all the points mentioned so far.