Comment 12 for bug 676465

David: because it's a style issue... there are two (or more) opinions. I can happily chuck in my experience (also as a programmer who stares at monospace for 60+ hours per week) that I /do/ prefer and find an aligned '*' far easier to read than one that is raised and so disrupts the flow of the line. It is not just multiplication/pointer use in code, it is every bullet point in every wiki source code page . It is the progress bars I watch, the regular expressions; ... the two characters that disrupt the evenness of the line the most (for me) and these are the * and the ^ (plus the ~ if it has been placed on the top line rather than in the centre).

It is currently an opnion one vs. one (indeed, where one person would /prefer/ to remain nominally neutral) and with two people that was too closely associated, it is not a statically useful sample. We /can/ take a decision now, but that shortcuts the opportunity to make it better. It is somewhat preferable to get it "out there" to the 1,000s and then start looking at feedback rates.

The fonts are not (purely) for our own gratification, they are for users.

To the best of my knowledge, when I talked with Amelie three weeks ago, the +-=<> symbols (lets ignore the specific case of the * for the moment) were aligned in the Monospace. To the best of my knowledge they were aligned in the regular aswell, but clearly when I sat down with Malcolm to look at the case tag implementation they were not/no longer aligned, and that is why this bug is filed.

Since the Monospace (to the best of my knowledge) does not currently have an alignment problem, it is not afflicted... we can talk about it and discuss it /here/, but it only severs to dilute the original specific point and then we end up with another enthusiastically commented bug report where the original intent has been lost, when instead, if there /is/ an issue somebody will file a bug to say so.