Monospace fonts are useful for things like ASCII art and aligning tables, but not very aesthetically pleasing, and therefore not favored for reports and the like.
non-monospace fonts look good (usually), but lack the regularity of monospace. even with tab stops, the alignment of a table or such will be thrown off when switching users or applications.
What i propose is a font in which each character is a small multiple of a given width. For example, slim characters like i, l, and single spaces get one unit. mid-sized lower-case characters get two. w, m, and most capital letters get three. Possibly M and W get four. Either way, height of the font is the equivalent of 4 units.-- nick_n_uit, Jan 16 2007 Isn't this what actually happens? "Each character is a small multiple of a given width" just means that a character has width. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.-- angel, Jan 16 2007 So the multi-spaced fonts would all conform to the same templates for i=1 space, a=2 spaces, and w=3 spaces etc. ?
That way, when you cycle between multispace fonts you do not alter the layout?
(Of course, if the unit used for space changes, you might skew a table)-- Jinbish, Jan 16 2007 What [angel] said: i - 2px f - 4px n - 5px m - 9px-- wagster, Jan 16 2007 The difference between this font and the types [angel] and [wagster] are describing is that instead of characters having a large variety of widths, they only have a small number (3-4) of different widths, and all the larger widths are multiples of the smallest. And, since a single space falls into the smallest width category, tabular data can be aligned the same way it can in monospace fonts.
The title is a bit misleading, but I couldn't think of a latin prefix that meant "not many, but more than one" when I initially posted.-- nick_n_uit, Jan 17 2007 The Latin "pauco-" or Greek "oligo-" mean this. You mean integral multiples of the space available. Personally, i've never got used to proportional spacing and see it as unnecessary. Maybe i'm getting old.-- nineteenthly, Jan 17 2007 The government should use such fonts when printing sensitive data; I don't know why it doesn't. When using a finely-proportionally-spaced font like Times Roman (the government standard) it's often possible to identify blacked-out words by carefully measuring the amount of space they take. There are some definite limits to this approach, but given a list of suspected words it may be possible to determine which one fits with much more specificity than if the government used a font with fewer character widths.
Alternatively, the government could use special software to slightly randomize word spacing.-- supercat, Jan 17 2007 This sounds useful, [nick]. I have often resorted to typing a space and then resizing the space character to be a larger or smaller font in order to nudge other characters over a bit. If the space's width were a greatest common divisor of the other widths, it would become a makeshift tab key. Good for beginners.-- phundug, Jan 17 2007 Isn't this why you use a table?-- K o R, Jan 20 2007 random, halfbakery