MN> In JHS, the output of < i. 2 3 has misaligned box characters.
RS> Altering the current JHS CSS font-family setting to add another
RS> alternative font before "monospace" might be worthwhile if this affects
RS> enough users and there is a common font on these systems that does work
RS> ok.
That's why I'm reporting this.
Unfortunately, I have little clue about font issues (I'm usually a
console guy) or on CSS. If somebody can explain to me how I can
check how the sequence '"Courier new", "Courier", "monospaced"'
gets resolved into font file, we could say if the misalignment is
from a standard system font or some locally added font. (I doubt
the latter, though. I inherited the mac-mini from my company which
doesn't knowingly install additional fonts (we do system stuff, not
layout/design work) and I checked four browsers which should all
be at their defaults. One of this Mac's jobs *was* to proof-read
web page layouts. But one never knows and I'll happily research
this further.)
When the betas are done, the released version should certainly
get this font right. Two reasons:
(1) I don't have Mac running right now to check for the exact wording,
but wasn't one of the very reasons for JHS to "enable front-ends
based on proven/ubiqitous/standardized technologies such as CCS/[...]"?
If JHS itself can't come up with a solution to elicit a usable
font, this promise is nothing more than empty marketing.
(2) The J6 java IDE on linuxen was actively deterring potential
new J developers by presenting itself as, I am sorry to say,
obviously crappy right on the initial startup after the download
and installation:
(a) On two occasions, the initial Welcome! dialog with a
mis-computed geometry so that the buttom part with the
"Never show this again" checkbox and "Exit to J session"
button was neither shown nor, of course, clickable.
No way to get rid of the box or start with the session.
"Epic fail."
(b) Non-ICCCM-compliance, ie., would only work with a few
X11 window managers nicely.
I *tried* to bring Linux users to J. Difficult with such a system.
Every (smart) Linuxer/Unixer ranks portability very high and is turned
off by software which fails in this respect like J6 did. I draw many
weird looks. I'd like J7 to be better.
The J6 console used graphical boxes which unfortunately caused xterms to
freeze when not set to UTF8 (still quite common over here because so much
here still depends on iso-8859-1/15). Silly as that may be, those hangs
are essentially impossible to analyze for a J newbie. I'm very glad that
J7 returned to fail-safe ascii boxes as the default for the jconsole.
Perhaps the same should be done for JHS if we can't come up with a
reliably working font spec?
However this gets resolved, making J newcomers wonder about and
deal with an output as present in my screenshot is NOT an option.
(We want more of those, don't we?)
Martin
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