Oliver Reichenstein, on iA Writer’s new font sizing:
>Inspired by our deep experience designing for the web, we’ve given Writer for Mac a responsive design, changing the font size based on window width. This maintains the text’s typographic proportions, zooming in and out without reflowing the text. I don’t know why it took us so long to find this obvious solution.
Writer now resizes to three levels based on the window width. It’s actually pretty neat, and the full screen views are not changed.
Writer is a very polarizing app for people — either you love it, or you laugh at it. I personally love it, because the focus is purely on writing and editing. The app is made for just that and that is what I need.
What is particularly interesting about this post is how Reichenstein views the three font sizes, saying this about the largest size:
>Seeing your sentence from close slows down your pace. This is particularly helpful if you have a tough subject to write about, that requires you to take one step at a time. Especially when paired with Focus Mode, this helps you write that difficult scientific paper, poem or philosophical text.
I had never thought about how font size controls the speed that you write with — but this may explain why I like “focus modes” so much in text editors. Such modes slow me down and cause me to think more instead of just typing down everything on my mind because I cannot easily glance at what I had written — I also don’t know how much I have written. It’s this kind of thought that leads to a product that is simply hard to describe in words, and is more about experience than features.
My only gripe right now with Writer is that you can’t bring those font sizes to the fullscreen mode — my preferred mode — all I want is a smaller font size for editing in fullscreen, perhaps I am alone.