> But there is a reason we don’t use monospaced fonts everywhere. They are somewhat hard to read because [...]
Well, not sure what is the basis for that assertion, but I find it easier to read text rendered in a monospaced font (Courier is my favorite). In fact, when I need to read something longer than a minute on the browser, I switch to monospace (with help of a browser plugin). It's not about text alignment -- it does not matter when reading prose, but perhaps about the familiarity of a font.
As an aside, I also try to get rid of formatting when reading long text. It allows me to focus on the essence of the written word. Perhaps, this is why the old school mailing lists and message forums are more appealing than the modern crop of social media apps. Also plain text email (what a rarity in the corporate world today!).
Yeah, if everyone was used to reading monospaced fonts then proportional fonts would be hard to read. I suspect there might be a bit of an advantage for proportional in terms of ultimate reading speed in that you might be able to fit in an extra word in your scan, but the alignment of a fixed grid might help a bit too. The real value of proportional fonts is that you can print more stuff on the page and make your book shorter and cheaper. In today's world the paper is basically free, so that is no longer an issue. It just means that you have less text on the screen and will have to page a bit more often.
I have to disagree a bit. Even stipulating that there may be some economic drivers for more compact text, my observation is people largely switched to using proportional fonts (outside of some specialty cases like code or tabular data) as soon as it was technologically possible to do so. People generally preferred proportional fonts when it was practical to use them with the equipment reasonable at their disposal.
Well, not sure what is the basis for that assertion, but I find it easier to read text rendered in a monospaced font (Courier is my favorite). In fact, when I need to read something longer than a minute on the browser, I switch to monospace (with help of a browser plugin). It's not about text alignment -- it does not matter when reading prose, but perhaps about the familiarity of a font.
As an aside, I also try to get rid of formatting when reading long text. It allows me to focus on the essence of the written word. Perhaps, this is why the old school mailing lists and message forums are more appealing than the modern crop of social media apps. Also plain text email (what a rarity in the corporate world today!).