Re: Feedback wanted: syntax highlighting in the LilyPond documentation

[Valentin Petzel]

Hello Paul,

The documentation does not specify any fonts. It simply uses the <code> and 
<blockquote> tags. That means that the fonts used are whatever font your 
browser chooses as default font, which on Windows systems appears to be 
Courier for monospace and apparently in your case Georgia for the regular 
text.

If we want to specify the font we’d probably need to find good default fonts 
for every system or provide our own fonts, which would very much favour OFL/
Apache/MIT/&c. kind of fonts.

I strongly vote to remain with a monospace font. Regular fonts are created for 
readability of regular text. Code is fundamentally different from regular text, 
so code becomes really hard to read in regular fonts. (Basically reading of 
normal text works by recognizing the shape of the words. But code is usually 
not made up from words.

But as you’ve mentioned the Source Sans Pro: Adobe has also issued a Source 
Code Pro font for Code, which might work really well here. It comes in an 
insane amount of cuts and even has a proper italic cut!

Also Source * fonts are licensed under the OFL, so there is no problem with 
distributing them with the website.

Cheers,
Valentin

Am Dienstag, 4. Jänner 2022, 11:14:49 CET schrieb Paul McKay:
> 
> And this seems the appropriate place to ask why the examples are all in
> fixed pitch Courier in any case. I know this is kind of  industry standard
> but it's one I don't find particularly helpful. I was once adept on the
> card punch machines and mechanical typewriters, but I think most of us
> abandoned fixed pitch fonts long, long ago. I'd suggest a sans serif font
> so that there's a clear contrast with the Georgia used as the text font in
> the documentation. Helvetica, Franklin Gothic and Source Sans Pro look good
> but I realize they might not be available on some platforms.
> 
> HTH
> Paul McKay

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