Top all-time · #125
Butterick’s Practical Typography
Personal blog · practicaltypography.comdesignwriting
Butterick’s Practical Typography is a personal blog at practicaltypography.com about design and writing. Since 2013, 316 different Hacker News readers have linked it 440 times, most often “Practical Typography”. The last post was in 2018, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 12 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Butterick's Practical Typography as the reference for typography rules such as line length, line spacing, hyphenation, dashes and font choice. Commenters also cite it as a beautifully designed site.
- Recommended for · 12 comments
- Commenters call the book exquisite and worth paying for, and the site the most beautiful on the web. Some say the book is a great read.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Butterick’s Practical Typography
Most-linked posts?
- Practical Typography61 people · 68 mentions · first linked 2017-09-26
- Butterick’s Practical Typography28 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2013-07-27
- Butterick's Practical Typography (2013)11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2017-12-15
- Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no (2019)11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2019-05-02
- Typography in ten minutes11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2013-07-24
- /line-length.html10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-03-01
- Why Racket? Why Lisp?10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-10-14
- Typography in Ten Minutes10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2017-10-07
- Practical Typography10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2013-07-24
- /hyphens-and-dashes.html8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-01-24
What Hacker News says?
Kudos for taking on this project, and I like the idea! I think it'll be a big project to take it to the next level, but would love to have a search engine that's more useful. Some reactions: - The font is really big and the columns really narrow, so I get 3 - 4 entries per page, something like 8 words per line, and huge spacings between lines, which makes it a frustrating experience. I've been using the recommendati…
Comment linking /
on “A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design”Submitted Practical Typography as a story · 472 points
HN discussionHe wrote the book on it. https://practicaltypography.com/
Comment linking /
on “GitHub Copilot investigation”Submitted Why Racket? Why Lisp? as a story · 418 points
HN discussionMatthew Butterick has done some good in this space, mostly from the perspective of typography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3tZisVDIVk https://practicaltypography.com/ https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/racketcon.html
Comment linking /
on “Hardest problem in computer science: centering things”Submitted Practical Typography as a story · 261 points
HN discussion> A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document, compared to the high-quality freely-available alternatives. https://practicaltypography.com/why-does-typography-matter.h...
Comment linking /why-does-typography-matter.html
on “You wouldn't steal a font”Submitted Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014) as a story · 242 points
HN discussionhttp://practicaltypography.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?”Submitted Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013) as a story · 225 points
HN discussionIt's an online free-to-read, donation-supported book on typography. He just linked to the wrong page. Which is described in the page he linked, by the way. Index page link: https://practicaltypography.com/index.html Edit: HN is graylisted by the site, presumably due to large numbers of non-paying referrals.
Comment linking /index.html
on “Five minute guide to better typography”Submitted The billionaire’s typewriter as a story · 219 points
HN discussionIt looks like the author has chosen to "graylist" HackerNews in an attempt to sell copies of his book. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but warning you that anyone clicking on your link is actually redirected to https://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html
Comment linking /graylist.html
on “Five minute guide to better typography”Submitted Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition as a story · 182 points
HN discussionIt's 10 min yet also a nice guide: https://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.ht... Just love the book and his fonts :) I know it has been posted before, but I just had to ...
Comment linking /typography-in-ten-minutes.html
on “Five minute guide to better typography”Submitted The economics of a web-based book as a story · 177 points
HN discussionA great guide to typography for the reader with a few hours to spare is Butterick's Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com/
Comment linking /
on “Five minute guide to better typography”Submitted Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no (2019) as a story · 157 points
HN discussionSome people might prefer two spaces, but my understanding is that all authorities on “good typography” have standardized on one space: https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences....
Comment linking /one-space-between-sentences.html
on “Writing one sentence per line”Submitted Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No as a story · 124 points
HN discussionThis is such a great thread, I'm excited to begin reading quite a few of the linked blogs (such as this one: https://acoup.blog/ ). These ones are some of my favorites: - www.wall.org/~aron/blog/ (physics, theology, history, philosophy) - http://xahlee.info/ (math, emacs, keyboards, etc.) - https://matt.might.net/articles/ (academy, compsci, etc.) - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ (programming, companies, etc.) - ht…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted The economics of a web-based book, year two as a story · 86 points
HN discussionConstrained line lengths increase readability: https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html
Comment linking /line-length.html
on “58 Bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere”Submitted The Cowardice of Brave as a story · 54 points
HN discussionThere are human limit to the lengths of the lines of text that you can reasonably ingest before it becomes difficult to seek to the next line. If you measure the number of characters in a line of text in a newspaper, magazine, or novel, you’ll find that there is an upper limit of around 100 characters and a lower limit of perhaps 30. Exceeding either of these degrades reading comprehension and looks amateurish. Usin…
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on “The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023)”Submitted The infinite-pixel screen as a story · 36 points
HN discussionYou can hyphenate ragged lines, too. And that’s not frowned upon by typographers (at least not by all of them). https://practicaltypography.com/hyphenation.html : ”In left-aligned text, hyphenation evens the irregular right edge of the text, called the rag.”
Comment linking /hyphenation.html
on “Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design”Submitted Why Racket? Why Lisp? as a story · 30 points
HN discussionYeah, I agree the line spacing is far too much. Butterick's Practical Typography recommends 1.2 to 1.45: https://practicaltypography.com/line-spacing.html Really the only reason to use a line spacing of 2 is if you are printing it and then editing the text with a pen. So... maybe in a print stylesheet in a very specific situation? But never on the web, IMHO.
Comment linking /line-spacing.html
on “58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere”Submitted Typography in Ten Minutes as a story · 13 points
HN discussion
