The PickAxe Book’s Font Choice
This morning I've finally gotten tired of the font choice for the Pragmatic Programmer's Programming Ruby 1.9 book. It's a lot smaller and not nearly as readable as every other Pragmatic Programmer's book I've got. I mean really bad. First, I read all my tech books on my MacBook Pro. I have a size I like to give them on the screen. I know the font is fixed on a PDF, but still… I find this very readable:
yet here's the PickAxe book at even more screen real estate:
To me, there's no contest.
So I wrote to the PP guys - on the off-chance that they might be interested in my feedback:
Guys,
I love your books. They are by far the "go to" books for learning anything I need for a new project or job. I have several. Wonderful stuff.
However, I have a slight bone to pick with you on the font choice for the Ruby 1.9 book.
What's up with the font? It's not the same font that I see on every single one of my other PragProg books. I like the "other" font. It's easy to read on computer screens as a PDF, and it's very nice and legible at a somewhat reduced size.
But the font for the Ruby 1.9 book is almost the exact opposite. Very hard to read. Nowhere near as clear.
It may be stylish, but as for me - give me back the old font and layout with the blue borders and the style that made PragProg the best tech books around.
I know it's just one voice, but hey... if you don't hear it from your friends, then others will just talk about you behind your back, right?
Dave Thomas wrote back:
As the person who picked the font, let me say I really appreciate the feedback.
The choice of font was difficult. The PickAxe had grown from a hefy 450 pages to a massive 950, and I really wanted to stop the trend. So I looked for ways to thin it down. One choice I made was to go for a font which was a little skinnier and a little more open, which would let me sometimes squeeze just a few more lines on the page. This one difference let me save about 60 pages overall. I also changed the layout of the standard library section and saved another 40 or so.
It's always a tricky compromise, but I hope that the marginal decrease in legibility is offset by the many thousands of pages that won't be printed 🙂
I can see his point - it would be a monster printed book, and a lot of people buy his books like this. I wrote back saying so, and he suggested reading it as ePub or mobi where I could set the font as I pleased. The problem with that is that there are no good ePub or mobi readers for the Mac that preserve the formatted text of the code samples. None. So I can read PDF that at least looks right, or nothing.
Not happy with the alternatives, but I don't have a lot of say about it either. It is what it is, and it's up to me to just suck it up and deal with it.
Shucks.