Stephen Poley <sb*****@xs4all.nl> wrote:
It's a question of preference: monospaced characters are wider than the
average character width of almost all proportional fonts, so quite a lot
of people - including myself - prefer them to be displayed at about 90%,
which is about as legible as a typical proportional font at 100%.
There's another thing too that favors somewhat reduced font size. Typically,
monospace font is used for computer code excerpts, which are technical
information, presented as examples or for reference. Being somewhat less
important than copy text in the average, it's usually OK to use smaller font
size.
But if there's some other reason for using monospace, e.g. if you use them
for artistic purposes, then suggesting font-size: 100% might be a good idea.
However the font may get subjectively rather big that way.
The choice of the monospace font face is important too. Specifically,
Courier New (a common default) looks considerably larger than Courier of the
same size. So if you set
pre, code, samp, kbd, tt { font-family : Courier, monospace; }
you will effectively reduce the subjective font size - in a manner which
seems adequate for most purposes IMHO. If copy text is conveniently
readable, then Courier, even if somewhat reduced in size by browser
defaults, should produce legible presentation for code-like text.
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ 
