Tufte CSS

And I really don't think it's aged that well. Large parts of defining what "good layout" for text is relies on a societal consensus that their taste aligns with it, and I think we've moved on.

Nope, I use light mode.

Seems like it was designed mobile-first. Or mobile-only.

The line height is cranked up to 1.75 and font size is derived from the view width:

    calc( 1em + (2 - 1) * ( (100vw - 20em) / ( 100 - 20) ))

Works on mobile (and probably on a vertically oriented monitor) but it's pretty poor on a small and wide laptop screen. Fortunately it's constrained to 2em above a vw of 100em or ultrawide would be very interesting indeed.

imo that effect is simply due to website being too zoomed-in

if you ctrl-minus a bit, it becomes more bearable

> Can anyone more informed comment on the font?

Could it be that you unconsciously prefer serif fonts to sans serif fonts? Sans serif fonts are preferred by people with dyslexia, for example.

Another thing that comes to mind is high contrast in stroke thickness, thick vertical strokes and thin horizontal or curved strokes. This is reminiscent of engravings and calligraphy, but can be difficult to read on a screen, especially when the font size is small. Anti-aliasing options can also affect this and lead to even greater differences between letters than expected.

Articles like this one may provide you with the right words to describe what you don't like about certain fonts: https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/a-beginners-guide-to-web-...

It's using a custom font called "ET Book," which is (according to its GitHub) inspired by Bembo.

If I had to guess at what you find grating, it might not be the letter shapes, but rather the spacing. At least rendered on a Mac, the inter-letter spacing just looks off; it's a little too tight all around, and certain pairs look inconsistent. It lacks visual smoothness. (I know that sounds like somebody talking about wine or oxygen-free audio cables, but I can't think of a better phrase.) It's possible that this is a quirk of Apple's font rendering algorithms, but I'm not convinced -- and it's definitely the font. If you prevent external fonts from loading or use the web inspector to remove "et-book" from the CSS and let it fall back to Palatino, the typesetting improves.

Basically every problematic pair with one of the letters being uppercased

Tu in Tufte

Pl in Please

We in Webpages

Al in Also

Punctuatuion symbols as in

Finally,

Markdown’s

As for small caps, on apple this is really bad “In his later books”

List goes on

Cursive in “as close as possible” has stroke width not matching the regular font. In regular font uppercased letters have thicker strokes than lowercased.

It’s really on OCD level triggering event to read that text.

I think that's sort of what the author is getting at, if expressing imperfectly -- when you look at black ink on white paper, you're almost certainly not seeing a physical embodiment of #000000 on #FFFFFF. I tend to think moving at least one of the two colors off "pure", if not both, makes pages look more pleasant. (To stave off people leaping in to say "you web designers hate contrast," I'm not talking about moving to light gray on slightly less gray; it's not difficult to keep well above the WCAG's 7:1 AAA-level contrast ratio while bringing things down just a notch.)

Contrast is a silly setting to even have for displays. Step #1 for decent monitor and TV calibration is always to set contrast to max anyway.

It's my website and I'll do what I want! :)

More seriously, you bring up a good point about form factors. I imagine you are reading my site on a cell-phone. On these devices I purposely made the page width more-or-less fill the width of the screen to fit more text in at a readable font-size.

This used to be a reasonable choice because cell phones all had bezels. Now that many phones have screens that extend all the way to the edge of the device, pages like mine look weird as the text bleeds underneath the users fingers.

Just another example of how it is difficult to design a page that looks good on the multitude of devices that people use these days.

I'm probably not going to change it though.