monospaced fonts

[orc at pell.portland.or.us]

In article <712EE2F9-AA00-46EC-B4E2-EA5924AE1069 at kineticode.com>,
David E. Wheeler <markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net> wrote:

>On Feb 26, 2009, at 5:00 AM, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote:

>

>> i hope you will agree with _my_ obvious counter:

>> monospaced fonts aren't the only way to do that.

>> indeed, they aren't even the most _common_ way.

>> (that distinction still goes to the old-fashioned tab,

>> by which i mean computation of the point to write.)

>

>No, but it's the expectation with Markdown that you'll use a  

>monospaced font.


    You know, I've never even considered this;  I can certainly
    see that it might be useful to use a monospaced font if you're
    working with an editor that bobbles leading indentation, but
    other than that there's nothing that cosmetically cares about
    what type of font is being used.

    Where is whitespace alignment important except at the start of
    a line?   (And just what font would have sizeof(N.) be large
    enough so that you'd need to indent more than 7 leading spaces
    to line up with the text items?  Wouldn't that count as a
    pathological case ("If you use the super-wide-periods font,
    your list items will look raggedy.  Sorry.") and be ignored?)



    -david "tables? yuk!" parsons