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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't necessarily call this a minimalist design. I do like Tufte-style websites with sidenotes, but these don't show on mobile for this site, despite my tablet having a large screen.

> Gwern.net used Baskerville, but system Baskerville fonts don’t have small caps.

Can someone explain to me what is meant by this? I don't understand what not having small caps means. I use Baskerville in my LaTeX documents with Michael Spivak's MathTime2 Pro fonts I purchased. I am currently building my blog, and despite trying to just get it out there and worry about my ideal design later, I am considering trying Baskerville and other such fonts instead of sans-serif fonts.

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Small caps are what they sound like, uppercase characters the size of lowercase characters. Kind of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps

Hmm, interesting. Thank you. Is that true that "system Baskerville fonts" don't have them? I never encountered this in my LaTeX documents, but I suppose it's possible my LaTeX distribution is shipping its own Baskerville-like font. I'd need to look into that. I am trying to come up to speed about font sourcing (right word?) on the web. It's also somewhat unfortunate, because as far as my research can tell, I am unable to configure MathJax to use a custom math font.

pdfTeX does not use your system fonts. It will not even load TrueType or OpenType fonts, but usually uses Type 1 fonts. Fonts for LaTeX come bundled with your TeX distribution like TeX live (on my Arch system present in /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/).

If you want to use system fonts you should have a look at Lua(La)TeX (or Xe(La)TeX but I think focus shifted completely to the LuaTeX engine).

> If you want to use system fonts you should have a look at Lua(La)TeX (or Xe(La)TeX but I think focus shifted completely to the LuaTeX engine).

Luatex seems the more promising technology from the point of view of continued evolution of the Tex ecosystem, but there's been talk of Luatex being the successor to Pdftex for over ten years and it was held up by the fact that Luatex is not superconservative in the way it changes Tex layout and is less so than Xetex.

I've not really followed the discussion about succession to pdftex in Texlive in recent years, but it'd definitely be a change to their risk-averse ways if they did simply change 'latex' to mean 'lualatex'.

What are they good for? The site mentions "automatic smallcaps typesetting". Why is that a good thing?

I can see they might be good sometimes but lots of them makes the page look busy.

And would you say that using lots of them is "minimalistic design"?

"These may have varying features, for example some lacking small caps." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baskerville#Digital_versions We use smallcaps heavily as an alternative to bolding everything, but it would be bad if we just use "font-family: Baskerville" and all sorts of unpredictable low-quality fonts out there screw it up. That Baskerville font you paid for probably has them... but how is a reader's web browser going to use it?

> I do like Tufte-style websites with sidenotes, but these don't show on mobile for this site, despite my tablet having a large screen.

Your iPad Safari reports having a width of ~1180 pixels in landscape mode, even though you have 2x the physical pixels (ie. 2x DPI scaling). This is much too small for sidenotes. Not getting sidenotes is correct. I don't think gwern.net is anything odd in this regard, every other responsive design website you visit must be giving you the same condensed view. Unless you're doing something like disabling scaling? Then in that case I guess maybe it should work and I'd need a screenshot & more information to see what's going wrong. (Maybe a media-query or something.)

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