I want to join others in thanking @wavyknife for dropping in and explaining things from the developers’ perspective. And I’ll add that I’m getting used to the monospaced font, because personally I definitely prefer the more traditional approach to markup with the preview window rather than the new-fangled WYSIWYG editor.
There is, in fact, a small practical problem with WYSIWYG in this context. In traditional WYSIWYG systems like Microsoft Word, every formatting option is controlled by menu-activated selections. But here, some formatting options like underline, strike-through, and font size (not heading types) have no corresponding menu actions. They have to be invoked by explicit tags, and once invoked, there’s no obvious way to undo them because the tags disappear and all you see is their formatting effect. Which is one reason I think, IMHO, that a basic composition window with a preview window is the preferred approach.
Anyway, aside from that, I think it would be very useful if there were some sort of announcement channel right on this SDMB site that informed us about upcoming changes. Knowing what changes are coming and the reasons for them helps to create a more collaborative atmosphere and would hopefully reduce complaints about them.
And finally, I won’t soft-pedal the fact that I’m quite upset by the fact that a whole generation of older browsers will apparently soon stop working with Discourse (although they will still work fine with 99.9% of the rest of the internet) in order to support a couple of obscure new features that, AFAIK, no one ever asked for.
Same here. I am reminded of writing documentation for IBM in the early 1990s. We had to use IBM’s Bookmaster, which was actually a pretty versatile markup language, on monospaced IBM 3270 terminals. We’re going back 35 years in the past, and I’m dragging out the recesses of my memory, but I’m glad to find that the skills that I acquired then are still useful.
No slam intended; I like the monospaced font. And I’ll add my thanks to @wavyknife for the explanation.
No, the monospace font is not ugly! It’s exactly what it should be. The problem with the previous font is that the glyphs “Il1” become “Il1”, which are difficult to distinguish. (Also “O0” vs “O0”.) This monospace is so easy to read. Much better than a Courier font also.
Yes, and I’d take it further. In modern coding, monospace isn’t just a nice to have, it is a requirement. In Python, the indentation is semantic: it is how blocks of code are denoted, rather than an end symbol.
And markdown is not just a thing on this board, but is used in many “coding” systems. For example, all my docstrings (a type of comment in Python) are written in markdown. This allows coding software to make easy-to-read documentation.
In these use cases, having an easy-to-read monospace font is important. It’s great that Discourse is finally giving us a proper markdown environment. I hope they also give us a proper WYSIWYG environment as well. Please don’t disparage the environment you don’t prefer.
I have a web design background and I’ve always preferred a side-by-side view for that, even going back to ancient times when I designed web sites in Netscape. So I like separating the code and image in different spots, that’s what I’m used to. But I understand that some people prefer a true WYSIWYG environment and don’t begrudge them for it, and I’m glad there’s now an option for those people (even if it’s a flawed option for now).
I recently vibe-coded a Javascript lib that takes a page where the body is written in Markdown and converts to HTML on the fly. I.e., you can write the page in Markdown, add a trivial header and footer, and when you access the page you get a nicely rendered HTML version (that even respects light- and dark-mode requests).
It’s much nicer than raw HTML for simple web docs and the like. And I definitely consider it a form of coding, albeit a simple one.
It is funny to hear monospace fonts called “ugly”. Any programmer, IT person, etc. is staring at monospace terminal windows, code editors, logging programs, etc. the vast majority of the time. We can be very picky about exactly which monospace font we use.
As an aside: I just Googled “courier font” as I was curious about its origin. Turns out they have an Easter egg where the search results page is entirely rendered in Courier.
Any chance you could share screenshots? Depending on your system, a different monospace font may be used, but none should be unreadable. In most situations, it will be one of these three:
JetBrains Mono:
Consolas:
Monaco:
I’m partial to Consolas, mainly because I use Windows and it was the replacement for Courier New, for which it was a vast improvement. But they’re all pretty good, IMHO.
I get something almost identical to Jetbrains Mono, complete with the same distinctive lower-case “L” and the zero with a dot in the middle, except the capital “J” lacks the serif at the top
The main thing I dislike about monospaced fonts, besides just the crappy appearance, is that they generally take up more horizontal space than proportional fonts, not least because of the relatively vast gaping size of blank spaces. A very minor point, I guess, in a composition window, but I can literally see the text progressing much faster than before with the old editor. This paragraph, for example, is 8 lines in the composition windows, and 6 lines the preview.
Courier New has the same problem. When writing in Word and I switch to Courier New to cite a URL or a code snippet, I have to reduce the font size to compensate, else the Courier text appears to be shouting!
I see the same. That is somewhat curious because the browser appears to request JetBrains Mono first. Maybe there are some minor variants of the font around. Most of the other glyphs look the same.
The font priority is: JetBrains Mono, Consolas, Monaco, monospace. I don’t know if JetBrains Mono comes by default on any OS, but if your browser supports downloadable fonts, that’s what you should get. Otherwise, you’ll get Consolas on Windows and Monaco on MacOS (since those come with the OS).
It’s possible that on some weird configs you’ll get the default “monospace” font, which could be fairly ugly. Maybe that could happen on some highly locked-down system running Linux or the like.
Microsoft has the best font rendering among the three major OSes, IMO. Mac and Linux are don’t use hinting correctly and are too blurry.
Courier New has three serifs on the l. As does Consolas. I don’t particularly care about that as long as the upper serif is clear (a downward angle for 1 and horizontal line for l).
What is it under “style & weight examples” that doesn’t meet your minimum expressed criteria? (To be clear, the lower-case “L” has three serifs, not two, but to my eye that’s closer to standard typography.)
BTW, although Courier New is quite similar to one of the most commonly used fonts on the IBM Selectric typewriter, and apparently owes its heritage to that, it’s not identical. I have no idea why changes were made in its migration to Windows.
According to Monotype, the original outline data that they used for Courier New was digitized directly from the golf ball of the IBM Selectric.
The raised image of the golf ball is designed to be thinner because when the image strikes the paper there can be significant spread of the ink on the paper.
Because the Courier New outlines are so thin, we had to make a special case when we displayed the font with ClearType and actually “thicken” the font to make it readable.
