On the virtues of monospace formatting

[kpreid]

 +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
 |                                                                            |
 |                                 A thought                                  |
 |                                 ---------                                  |
 |                                                                            |
 |  |\  /|onospaced text  documents were the first  WYSIWYG-edited documents. |
 |  | \/ | One can create paragraph formatting and headings, special layouts, |
 |  |    | integrated diagrams, decorations --  all interactively with exact  |
 |  immediate feedback  upon just how it  will appear (outside of  choice of  |
 |  font) on screen, paper printout, someone else's email client -- anything  |
 |  whatsoever that displays this medium.  Though,  font characteristics can  |
 |  affect the quality of diagrams and decoration; for example, how high the  |
 |  “~” or “^” symbol is,  and how much of a character cell is filled by the  |
 |  character shape.                                                          |
 |      This, however, is a minor disadvantage,  and I have even today found  |
 |  uses for this style of document preparation;  for example, certain class  |
 |  assignment submissions.  The usual tool is Microsoft Word documents; but  |
 |  I do not own a copy of Word,  and while OpenOffice (dot org) is adequate  |
 |  for reading, its rendering is often different from Word's  -- and I have  |
 |  even encountered data loss bugs: “Hey! Where'd my table go?”  After that  |
 |  incident, I resorted to plain text for the assignment (which was essenti- |
 |  ally tabular in structure) and have used such formatting since for those  |
 |  things which are amenable to the format.  I could have used HTML, or sub- |
 |  mitted a PDF rendered from OpenOffice-on-my-computer or a LaTeX document, |
 |  but I wanted to choose a format  which I was confident would seem a reas- |
 |  onable type of document to the recipient,  and plain monospaced text fit  |
 |  that role well.                                                           |
 |      It can even be fun  to lay out your document  completely by hand, if  |
 |  it is not too long  -- and rather than fiddling with margins,  tab stops, |
 |  table editing tools, etc.,  you can just  *write what you want* directly, |
 |  just as much as if you were writing on paper, with all the advantages of  |
 |  an electronic document. Unless you want graphics that are no bigger than  |
 |  a character.                                                              |
 |                                                                            |
 |   |/    .    /)  . /                                                       |
 |  /\_Ø\///\  /\_Ø/(/.                                                       |
 |                                                                            |
 |  P.S. If you want to reply in like style,  use the <pre>...</pre> element  |
 |  and click the “More Options...” button to get to the “Don't auto-format”  |
 |  option.                                                                   |
 |                                                                            |
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Comments

Very nice

[ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Nicely done there Kevin... though surely the monospaced signature is just showing off (which I unfortunately can't do since my signature is more of a scrawl).

[tomlokhorst.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Perhaps its a bit ironic, but I couldn't read this post in my RSS reader.

While all other items in Google Reader are nicely re-flowed to fit the limited resolution on my iPhone, this one did not.

I had to fall back to a laptop to read this post. There, it turned out, I had to horizontally scroll, because I don't have my web browser window maximized.

Although monospaced text might work fine in a printed form, were you know the physical size of the medium beforehand. I guess for posting content to the web (or through RSS), HTML is far superior.

Markdown ftw

[(Anonymous)]

Monospace is indeed very nice and a year or so ago I started looking for tools which would accept text files which uses layout information. That's when I started using Markdown and pandoc to write many of my documents. It lets me do a lot of things using plain monospaced text while still render it in various nice, and to some people more presentable ways.