Fonts

The iA writer fonts are just mouthwateringly good. I discovered them through the Typewriter Obsidian theme on 12th December 2024. iA make an Office Suite competitor incl. Writer and have blogged about their font family at From Monospace to Duospace In Search of the perfect writing font.

Here are a few great things about it, lifted from that post.

1. Honest Shape In contrast to proportional fonts that communicate “this is almost done” monospace fonts suggest “this text is work in progress.” It is the more honest typographic choice for a text that is not ready to publish. Compare the following two: Which one is more appropriate for publishing, which one is more appropriate for work in progress? The typographic rawness of a monospace font tells the writer: “This is not about how it looks, but what it says. Say what you mean and worry about the style later.” Proportional fonts suggest “This is as good as done” and stand in an intimidating contrast to a raw draft.

2. Reading Pace vs Writing Pace Proportional fonts are optimized for high reading speed. That makes them the perfect choice for reading. Good writing, on the other hand, is measured, reflected, slow.

3. Discernability of letters and words In a perfectly regular horizontal and vertical raster, letters and words become easily discernible: A typical proportional font comes with word spaces as wide as an i. Monospace fonts come with rather large word spaces. This makes it easier to discern each word and letter.

They made their Writer fonts available publicly: iA Writer has three custom made writing fonts that are available for download.

The iA fonts are “a modification of IBM’s Plex font” according to the project README. Find IBM’s Plex® typeface on GitHub.