Gwern.net — Web Design & Typography

Poetry HTML Typesetting · Gwern.net

Gwern — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Web design post-mortem of ways to typeset poetry and how we developed our advanced approach. Possible approaches are PDF plugins, PNG screenshots, semantic class soup, and Pandoc line blocks. Gwern.net has a two-tier system: div.poem for stanzaic verse with automatic enjambment, pre.poem-html implementing ‘Source Code WYSIWYG’ with Nimbus Mono L font and JS inline-width compensation. Covers slash/caesura syntax highlighting, responsive line-breaking, and LLM corpus cleanup.

Sidenotes In Web Design · Gwern.net

Gwern — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In typography/design, ‘sidenotes’ place footnotes/endnotes in the margins for easier reading. I discuss design choices, HTML implementations and their pros/cons.

Website Colors: Red vs Blue · Gwern.net

Gwern — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I manually extract RGB colors for 225 websites and graph them: red > blue > green > purple > yellow–brown.

Subscripts For Citations · Gwern.net

Gwern — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A typographic proposal: replace cumbersome inline citation formats like ‘Foo et al. (2010)’ with subscripted dates/sources like ‘Fooet al2020’. Intuitive, easily implemented, consistent, compact, and can be used for evidentials in general.

InvertOrNot.com Proposal · Gwern.net

Gwern — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Description of a useful service for web development: a website which wraps a neural network trained to classify images by whether they would look better inverted in a website/app dark-mode, or faded.

Who Buys Fonts? · Gwern.net

Gwern — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Fonts are durable, highly-reusable, compact, & high-quality software products which do not ‘bitrot’. Nevertheless, hundreds or thousands of new ones come out every year despite enormous duplication; why? I speculate that designer boredom seems to be the answer: they crave novelty.

Design Of This Website · Gwern.net

Gwern — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting.

Rubrication Design Examples · Gwern.net

Gwern — Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A gallery of typographic and graphics design examples of rubrication, a classic pattern of using red versus black for emphasis.

A/B testing long-form readability on Gwern.net · Gwern.net

Gwern — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A log of experiments done on the site design, intended to render pages more readable, focusing on the challenge of testing a static site, page width, fonts, plugins, and effects of advertising.

Rare Greek Variables · Gwern.net

Gwern — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I scrape Arxiv to find underused Greek variables which can add some diversity to math; the top 10 underused letters are ϰ, ς, υ, ϖ, Υ, Ξ, ι, ϱ, ϑ, & Π. Avoid overused letters like λ, and spice up your next paper with some memorable variables!