Excursus

I am a theme whore. Not only have I downloaded all the themes on the TextMate Wiki, I have tried my hand at making my own. Switching between themes helps cut down the eye-strain, and some are better suited to different ambient lighting conditions than others. But there is more to this inconstancy. Though irrational, in my heart of hearts I yearn for the One True Theme. There is no such thing, I know. Just as I know that existing themes are pale shadows of the One True Theme.

It is not only themes that elicit this obsessive-compulsive behavior but monospace fonts as well. While I find that proportional fonts, especially serif fonts, are easier to read, I much prefer writing with a monospace font. Even if my text editor supported proportional fonts, I wouldn’t use them. Fortunately, the asynchronous WYSIWYG nature of LaTeX allows me the best of both worlds. I write the LaTeX source in a text editor with a monospace font. And when I edit, I read the PDF it produces with a proportional font (currently Hoefler). Monospace fonts that I have used include Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and its updated variant with more characters DejaVu Sans Mono. I have also used ProFont and Inconsolata. Raph Levien, the designer of Inconsolata and maintainer of Ghostscript was inspired by Luc(as) de Groot’s Consolas. Consolas is currently my favorite monospace font. And it is a Microsoft product! Must be penance for Comic Sans. It really is a beautiful monospace font but be sure to turn on font smoothing to see it at its best. Curious? Download your copy of Consolas here.

Here is a picture courtesy of Poynter Online: