TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
>>> Bev Lockhart <bl -at- SEATTLELAB -dot- COM> queried: >>>
So where do I go to find out whether a font is proportional or not? (I'm
specifically curious about Ariel.)
I don 't know where you can go for a list of fonts, but it's pretty easy to tell just by looking, since proportional just means that the letters take up space in proportion to how wide they are. Ariel is proportional--you can tell by typing a word like "lime"--it's easy to see that the "m" takes up much more space than the skinny little "l" and "i" so you know it's proportional. In a non-proportional font (like Courier), every letter is allotted the same amount of space, regardless of its width. I would venture to say that most fonts you will encounter nowadays, and those used frequently, are proportional.
