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Comment by PhoenixWright | Hacker News Reader

Initially I thought this would work great for development but then I thought of all the different colors in my IDE. Regardless I think this is an interesting idea to reduce eyestrain when looking at code, even if imperfect.

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It could work if IDEs ever get richer typography.

I experimented with a monochromatic color scheme for my F# projects. Basically, I wanted the code to look like a page from a beautifully typeset math book. It got pretty close, but for want of italics, which VS does not support.

Can you share a screenshot/mockup of how that was supposed to look?

The CLRS Algorithms textbook typesets its pseudocode with keywords in bold, variables in italics, function names in small caps, and the rest in plain. You could go even further with a bit of grayscale shading or a complementary pair of serif and sans serif typefaces, but like any syntax highlighting scheme it would be very language-specific.

Sure. This is pretty close to what I had: https://github.com/noblethrasher/typography/blob/master/fs-t... (the typeface is Adobe Garamond Pro).

But, it would be nice if VS supported italics, various font weights, and small caps.

Wow, that looks way better than I thought it would. I'm saddened to hear that after all the effort into the new VS text system it isn't capable of doing all you wanted.

Once you're doing typesetting like that, I think it would be even better if you start replacing keywords with special symbols and reformatting the lines to some canonical representation. That would make it way easier to read.

Fortress?

I'm playing around with rich IDE typography right now (but with color), it especially pops out at higher DPIs.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/liveprogramming...

Thanks… I actually got the idea to start using proportional typefaces from a comment that you made.

Another thing that I tried was to extract each font variant into a separate file, and then to force VS to use those explicitly for different code element types, but that didn't work.

Cool. You might want to try a san serif font; serif fonts aren't really in fashion right now :)

It's funny, but for me languages have typographic affinities. Of the ones that I regularly use:, F# feels like it should be Garamond, C# and JavaScript feel fine in pretty much any monospace sans serif typeface, and VB is most congruent with "fun" typefaces like comic sans (I don't mean that as a dig).

Hey, you're actually the author of these articles! I remember seeing them before.

Got an RSS feed to make it easy to keep up with your articles?

Although this would be perfect for documentation

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