Re:Faster web fonts
by vbernat on Sunday May 16, 2021 @02:50AM
(#27171744)
I always find builtin fonts difficult to pair when you want to use monospace for code. If you take Times New Roman and Courier New for example, Courier New is quite larger visually, so you would need to use a smaller point size for it. But how to do that when you need to handle fallbacks? On my blog, I am pairing Merriweather with a custom version of Iosevka to match x-height and ascendant height. I think this is less disturbing when reading.
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For me, this is a bug of the OS or the browser. On my OS, Noto Sans is the default sans-serif font and Noto Mono the default monospace font and they pair impeccably. Whatever font you are telling my browser to use will probably be worse for me (at least because of the loading time, and because it is actually hard to match the readability of Noto in my opinion).
It's unfortunate Courier New is both so badly different from the regular fonts (and so bad at all, by the way) and also the default on Windows.
Courier New, with all its unfortunate quirks, is there for a reason, AFAICT. It copies the typewriter font metrics. There are many situations where texts are measured by the number of "standard typewriter" characters and lines, established like 100 years ago.
Using Courier New for code samples is not a great idea. I think it comes from the times when good monospace fonts did not yet exist. I always change this default, andvi wish browsers somehow stopped clinging to it.