I have been planning a follow up to my previous post about monospace fonts. This is not the planned follow up. However, background reserarch has uncovered an interesting monospace font with special properties. DPCustomMono2, commissioned by Distributed Proofreaders, is designed to maximize the legibility of text for the purposes of proofreading. Given the special context, there is an understandable emphasis on the distinctness of characters. This comparison of DPCustomMono2 and Arial gives a good sense of this. It ain’t pretty. I don’t think I would use it as my default font. But proofreading your own writing is hard. Paul Benacerraf once suggested to me that this may be due, in part, to the cognitive difference between encoding thoughts and decoding thoughts. (They are, after all, your thoughts; so what’s to decode?) Given the special challenges of proofreading your own work, especially if it is long, like a book or thesis, it may be worth printing out your text in DPCustomMono2.1
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Yes print out. Proofreading on paper is easier and less eye strain than proofreading on screen. At the very least do it on paper at the final stages of the project. ↩
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Interesting, Mark. I will try this. You are quite right that paper proofreading is the way to go. Paper really focuses your attention on what’s printed on it, unlike the protean computer screen. It took me a while to realize the most important tool for a writer is a fast and reliable printer.
At the moment, these are my two favorite latex tweaks to produce a special printing style for editing drafts:
usepackage[lmargin=1cm,rmargin=5cm,tmargin=1cm,bmargin=1cm,marginparwidth=5cm,includeall]{geometry}
newcommand{fixme}[1]{marginpar{textcolor{red}{fixme}: #1}}
There’s also double-spacing (obviously), and printing strucken out passages in a special style (colored, or italicized, for instance).
With clever use of the the ifthen package, you can turn all these effects on or off just be changing one parameter at the top of your document’s master .tex file, or even just by choosing different makefile target.
Now if only I could finish getting svn-multi to play well with git….
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