I am building a system that connects texts (books, research papers, etc.) in a meaningful way to help people decide what to read and be aware of how texts relate to each other.

A proportional width font terminal. "i" and "w" shouldn't take up the same amount of horizontal space. We used to have to do that because computers were slow and we counted cycles and every bits mattered. We live in a land of plenty now though so we can spend cycles doing math so that ls -l/top/etc table output is still aligned but "i" and "w" can take up the appropriate amount of horizontal space.