Farewell to the Quick Brown Fox [readlink]
In years past, our proofs were full of pangrammatic foxes and lynxes and the rest, which made for some very merry reading. But invariably, I’d find myself staring down a lowercase J, and if I questioned the amount of space assigned to its left side, I’d set off in search of some confirmation in the proof. Each time, I’d be reminded that while pangrams delivered all kinds of jocks and japes and jutes and judges, even our prodigious list featured not a single word with a J in the middle.
I spend way more time evaluating fonts than any graphic designer or typographer. This fact should be self-evident. I'm a writer and I'm also relaunching my blog. This means that instead of just launching the blog, I keep messing around with new font combinations for the CSS sheet. And instead of writing, I keep wasting time trying to find The Perfect Monospace Font for Ulysses.
(Currently determined to be JetBrains Mono. But check back with me in a week or so. As a machine for procrastinating, the settings for your writing environment are about as close as Science will ever get to a source of perpetual energy.)
And so I say, God bless Jonathan Hoefler. He's an actual design pro and he came to a belated realization: none of the dummy text we tend to use when evaluating a font aren't very helpful. He's come up with a sequence of words and sentences that isn't as fun as "jackdaws love my big box of quartz," but does a better job of showing off how a font behaves when you let it off the leash and run in a field somewhere.
All writers are indebted to Mr. Hoefler. We now have an excuse to start the Great Font Hunt from scratch.
(Yes, upon reading his post I did go off and actually write something. But don't let that influence your judgment. This piece is so valuable that I delayed my own procrastination in order to get it into the hands of my fellow writers as quickly as possible.) ⓘ
