Preferred Font & Colouring

Monaco 9pt was what I first discovered text games in at the age of about 13… Zork 1 and the Unnkulian Unventures, and the look remains my most preferred. However, that was on a Mac Performa 550, where size 9 was still readable… I use 11 or 12 pt now with my present screen resolution. We had a Mac Plus before that, too… such good memories of games like Dark Castle…

I’m quite photosensitive so prefer darker colour scemes. Not a fan of the Amiga versions of Infocom games either. I find the interpreter to be uniquely ugly starting with the standard system font, colour scheme, but also including the distracting Amiga UI elements including windows chrome. Thank goodness for Frotz and the other z machine interpreters

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I also like to use monospace fonts. Currently I like Courier Prime, though I went through a Linux Libertine Mono phase a few years back that still survives in my Inform 7 installation. For colors, I use dark green on light gray in Frotz and Glulxe, which is not necessarily a beautiful combination, but it helps to visually distinguish an IF game from a terminal window (for which I use the opposite, light gray on dark green) or a text editor (black on white).

…And now part of me is thinking I shouldn’t be telling all this to strangers on the Internet.

If you like monospace fonts, don’t forget about Comic Shanns!

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Reportedly, Sean Connery’s favourite.

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I’m also in the camp that prefers a dark color scheme on most websites for text - light text on a darker background. The only combo I severely dislike is when the background is bright red - especially with white text or a purplish text it makes the letters seem to quiver and swim in contrast in peripheral vision.

One thing to think about is making sure the colors you choose are discernable to someone with different types of color-blindness. It usually comes into play if you have any hyperlinks of differently-colored/highlighted text. You can upload a screenshot to simulate how the colors of your interface appear with different types of color-blindness on this website: https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/

Someone else had also mentioned that using pure black at 0,0,0 as the background can also cause problems for some and recommend bumping the brightness for any black background up a couple points.

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What do people think about fully-justified text?

It seems rare in IF, despite being standard elsewhere (if not this forum). Obviously it was harder to do at one time, so no surprise early games did not do it .

Not a fan. It’s easy to lose your place in a completely square paragraph - except for occasional stylistic effect if you want the text to seem like a magazine or newspaper article.

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IMO, justified text is suitable only for print (or PDFs which are designed to look/feel like print, even if no one actually prints them). It takes actual effort to make justified text look good, without awkward spaces that are far more distracting than a ragged right margin. On mobile, in particular, justified text is usually a disaster.

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I like to use justified text. The ragged right edge of text blocks annoy me. :man_shrugging: However, not all justified text algorithms are created equal, and not many make the jump to mobile screens very well.

For the demos I wrote for my game engine, I have the text justified, but I disable it if you resize the browser window to less than 800px wide (which means it’s also disabled on many mobile devices) because the justification spaces it really funky and makes it harder to read. Kindle on mobile seems to do it fine, but the Moon Reader app seems to struggle with the it, so I have it disabled there. It’s a case by case basis.

Also, all this talk of Monaco being classic makes me wonder how many IF players own a Mac. I don’t think I know a single Mac owner IRL. I have a few online friends that have a MacBook that they mostly use for work, but a Windows desktop is still their main device. It’s funny how many people here primarily use Mac compared to everyone else I know.

10 posts were split to a new topic: OS Discussion (Windows/Mac/Linux etc)