Those personal computers of the 1980s became today’s laptops and smartphones. And somewhere deep inside your modern computer’s operating system, there’s still a command line window that harkens back to it all.

Fortunately, in the last decades, through support for things like vector fonts, high-resolution displays, and Unicode, we reclaimed a lot of the good practices of setting type in print. But it is not uncommon to see websites without appropriate dashes, with ASCII apostrophes instead of proper quotes… not to mention bigger subtleties like hanging quotes, ligatures, or proper small caps characters.

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Here at Medium, we’re still fighting to bring it all back. Below is a list of the things we are doing to advance on-screen typography. We wanted to share it for two reasons:

• Grab our ideas and practices, implement them elsewhere, and improve on them. We put together a sibling document with technical details of what we do
   — we hope you take them for a spin, reuse, and make better!
• Hold us responsible to best possible typography on Medium, and point out the things that could be improved.

We broke down our list into six sections:

There’s so much more to do. We’ll be working on supporting more languages and typographical customs; we want to explore adding

We’re also constrained in many ways by browser support for things we want to do.

Please tell us how we’re doing, teach us new things, and help us prioritize our efforts. Leave notes on this document, email [email protected], or tweet at @MediumDesign… send us feedback no matter how small it might seem. I’m already looking forward to it.

Many people say we’re largely in a post-PC world already… I want to make sure it’s also a post-typewriter one. We can bring back the glorious typography of the days before typewriters, and then make it even better.

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Thank you to Dustin Senos, Nick Santos, Gianni Chen, Daryl Koopersmith, Kyle Hardgrave, and many other Medium employees who helped with and supported the above features. Also, thank you to Tim Ahrens, Bram Stein, Sean McBride, Craig Mod, Jean-Daniel Guyot, and others who helped me learn more about typography and provided valuable feedback.

In the Medium typography series, we previously covered underlines, hanging quotes, Whitespace, pilcrows, and Polish S. Are we missing something interesting? Want to know more? Email us at [email protected].

Also, we’re looking for ambassadors in different countries — people knowing their language, caring about typography, wanting stories on Medium to look and behave most properly for where they are. Let us know at [email protected]. Thank you!