Zotero 7 Beta redesigned: Year/Date/Time (accessed, added) columns not using tabular lining figures

joaofrgomes

Once again, congrats on the redesign, it's looking great!

Just a little observation on something that is actually my area of expertise (typography), though: please use tabular lining (i.e. monospaced) figures in the year, date accessed and date added columns (and maybe also on the relevant, corresponding fields on the sidebar?) on the Mac version.

SF Pro has them and the Finder and other apps definitely use them in the analogous fields/columns, and it shouldn't be too hard to specify those in the theme.

And, IIRC, Zotero 6 already used those from Lucida Grande, as did the earlier v.7 betas with SF Pro and the old design, so I'm guessing this was just a minor oversight.

dstillman

We never did this, but we can look into it.

joaofrgomes

@dstillman Cool, thank you for your attention!

The main advantage is having all dates lining up neatly, which, in my case, is especially nice because I don't care much for the super granular time, only date.

This allows me to size the corresponding columns just right and have the ellipsis (…) truncation fall consistently right after the date on all entries that do have a complete timestamp.

But even in more generic use cases, it just makes such lists look nicer and more readable, as is common typographic and UI practice in such structured and repetitive data fields.

You may also want to look into which specific designs for 0 and 1 you will use. Slashed zero and serifed one are available but, since the Finder doesn't use them, I am guessing their usage is not predicated in Apple's HIG for this particular application, either.

Slashed zero in particular doesn't make much sense, as there are no alphabetic characters in those fields, like capital O, that might be mistaken for it. So basically their shapes should be the same as now, only monospaced.

mikisan

Just so you know, this also happens (W10) for other reasons, haven't checked instances related to monospaced fonts, but the lack of leading zeros in dates cause some misadjustments.

https://i.postimg.cc/nh7kTMG5/2024-01-26-191059.png

joaofrgomes

@mikisan that looks, indeed, like a more extreme case of what I just mention. However, isn't that something you can fix in Windows's own Regional/Date & Time settings? IIRC, leading zeros are related to date formats, and it seems those (DD/MM/YYYY, or YYYY/MM/DD) are more of a thing in Europe (as is 24h time, etc.)…

But yes, it may indeed be the case that Zotero is using a format tailored for running text where it should be using a format specific for tables.

mikisan

My Windows 10 regional settings have leading zeroes on both the short and long date format but not on any of the time formats. Yet Zotero, as per my screen capture, has no leading zeroes on either time or date, so it may be getting the format from its own place.