Post by pelf
You guys are probably going to tell me I'm going way overboard with the nitpicking here. Sorry.
The CSS selector for the \ and \ tags's
font-family section looks like this...
font-family: 'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono','Lucida Console','Courier New',Monaco,Courier,monospace;
Usually I have Bitstream Vera Sans Mono installed on every box I use, so I didn't notice this until recently. An example of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono in a manually-aligned code block:
http://i52.tinypic.com/2vn1kao.gifAn example of Lucida Console in a manually-aligned code block:
http://i52.tinypic.com/123mzac.gifThis exposes a shortcoming of Lucida Console shared by many more fixed-width fonts than I'd like to acknowledge. The bold version of each character actually takes up more horizontal space than the regular version of each character. That, of course, means that any combination of bold and regular (and possibly italic, though I haven't checked that) will result in mis-alignments when the intention is to have stuff manually aligned to produce a tabular appearance.
Now, I obviously acknowledge that the choice of Lucida Console was made long, long ago in the early stages of development of the forum system. I'm not entirely sure you would want to change that now; but, to me, given the lack of a viable \ tag and all the accompaniments that tag would require, being left with \ and \ as the only way to produce tabular data, this is a deal-breaker.
An obvious option would be to remove Lucida Console completely from the CSS. Or, it could be moved to after Courier New, but that means nobody would ever hit it as nobody with Lucida Console installed would not have Courier New installed. You could also replace it with Consolas; but, my personal opinion is that Consolas is a pretty poor font and I prefer Courier New to that more or less every time.
I'm not sure you care about something like this; but, it's in my nature to bring it up. I won't see it anywhere I have Bitstream installed; but, I hate to think that something that I've forrmatted to my satisfaction will actually look shoddy on someone else's browser.
