## Checking wordpress.com themes.

The point of this post is to evaluate how different wordpress.com themes look.  There is a startling lack of decent themes.  Most use a tiny main font!  It seems that everyone assumes Internet users sit really close to their monitors and have incredible eye-sight. For books and classic typography, small fonts make a good deal of sense. For digital screens, arguments about printing cost are suspect.  Ease of access is the key element and a moderate size font is appropriate.  For example, the wordpress editor uses the equivalent of an 8pt font on my screen.  I can read 10 or 11pt at arms length, but 8pt?  This diatribe is most likely long enough that it should suffice for a test of the themes.

I intend to use this blog for a few things. One is keeping track of idioms I always find myself typing.  A common one is identifying the unique items in a list.  Peter Bengtsson wrote a long article about this topic: Fastest way to uniqify a list in Python.
 function uniquify(list): """ Python code to uniquify a list function f9 from http://www.peterbe.com/plog/uniqifiers-benchmark """ return {}.fromkeys(seq).keys()

Another intention is writing about mathematics.  Towards that end, I need latex.  My favorite latex example is the simple definite integral $f(y) = \int_0^y f(x) \, dx$.  In a bad math font, the simple integral never looks correct.  I also work with linear systems: $Ax = b$.

## Postscript

I decided on the theme Quentin.  It has a garrish brown color, but excellent typography.  The serifed font is large enough to interact well with the latex.  The fonts definitely clash between latex and the body text — such is the state of online text.  Perhaps I’ll pay for custom CSS if I use the blog frequently.