Miscellany, Vol. 2

It’s been a quiet two months since the last time. It’s mainly the typography that has seen adjustments. The big improvement is the responsive font size, but there are a few odds and ends to mention:

• q elements with nested quotes at the start or end automatically have better spacing. See, for example, the last paragraph of my thoughts on Reservation Dogs.

• Lists like this once again respect the margins of the text rather than push their markers outside. I dislike breaking with typographical tradition, but I found it difficult to distinguish between single-paragraph list items followed by a paragraph outside the list and multi-paragraph list items. The margin on the left prevents the ambiguity without requiring excessive vertical spacing or other visual aids.

• Block-level ins elements now have special indicators (see, for example, Finding Uncommitted Changes with PowerShell and fd). I experimented with a few variations, including bracketing the start and end of the insertions, before settling on these. The green I’m using isn’t particularly appealing but it’ll do until I’m struck by further ins-piration.

• Arabic, Persian (as seen in 2021: Afterword), and Urdu text now uses Amiri instead of falling back on a default font that isn’t likely to fit with the rest of the text. True, it’s one more font file, but it’s only downloaded when such text is present.

• Lists of entries now link the streams (e.g. Journal) to their pages.

• Headings inside entries are nudged to the left for better optical alignment.

• The main element has less vertical padding on larger screens since there’s a lot of space above the headline in any case.

• Code-like text is very slightly smaller for a more uniform appearance.

Next in series: Introducing: Games!(#25 in Colophon: Finding A Place For My Head)