Fonts (was: Introducing Cobra)

[SJS]

begin  quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 01:29:35PM -0800:
> Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
> >Ralph Shumaker wrote:
> >>I never understood why spaces and tabs cannot be displayed with 
> >>something visible.
> >
> >Because a tab is not a printing character, it is a *control* 
> >character, and its semantics are poorly defined.
> >
> >Tab is *not* just n spaces.  It is "move the head/platen to tab stop" 
> >and "tab stop" is defined by the end user.
> 
> Be that as it may, that still doesn't address ASCII 032 not having the 
> option of being visible so as to visually be able to differentiate it 
> from a tab, on screen that is.

I've used editors where tabs and spaces were visible.

It got kind of annoying after awhile.

Although, come to think of it, I didn't try using those editors for
looking at IAS code. Hm.

>                                 On the printouts, I would prefer things 
> be as they are, except maybe being able to tell the printer to use the 
> computer's definition of the tab.  I think someone mentioned that the 
> printer *always* uses 8.

That was probably me. And it's a default -- some of the old dot-matrix
printers, at least, had the ability to "set tabstops", IIRC.

[snip]
> I'm not so sure I necessarily want "A font for programming must be 
> monospaced", but the rest of the description sounds great!  I like 
> monospace in email (especially when doing or viewing ASCII art).  I like 
> monospace on the command line, vim, but probably not in Firefox.

Heh. If it's not printed, I prefer monospaced.

> I'll check it out.
> 
> But I distinctly remember on my Amiga computer being able to modify 
> fonts myself.  And a quick search for "linux font editor" thru Viv?simo, 
> the first page of 20 results netted 9 pages of interest.

I made a few fonts with the Amiga Font Editor. It was fun, and you soon
realize that making *good* fonts is not an easy task.

Amiga Fonts could also be in color, which made it possible to do a slick
version of Rogue... not until the tile-based nethacks came out did I
ever see anything similiar on another platform.

> But I don't see why any of the other fonts I mentioned should be 
> untouchable.  It would be nice to have all fonts on my system show a dot 
> or a slash in the zero.  It would be nice them all have a very short 
> horizontal half roof on the left side of a vertical line for the lower 
> case L (whether it has a base or not, I don't care).  It would be nice 
> for all fonts on my system to have a down sloping half roof on the left 
> side of a vertical line with a full base for the number one.  It would 
> be nice for them all to have a vertical line with the top half replaced 
> by a small but visible dot for a lower case I and an upper case I that 
> looks like the cross section of an I-beam.

You mean you want something like:

  xxx            xx
   xx           xxx
   xx            xx
   xx    and     xx
   xx            xx
   xx            xx
   xx          xxxxxx

?

> But just as nice, I would like to have fonts that have a space (ASCII 
> 032) that shows something visible on the screen but is invisible in a 
> printout.  Even if tabs don't show anything visible, at least something 
> visible for ASCII 032 would visually distinguish it from the tab.

Changing the font on your system would do that, I would think.

[snip]

-- 
The creation of beautiful fonts is magic deep
One day, in the pool of metafont I should leap.
Stewart Stremler