There is good news on this front: You no longer need to install new fonts in order to display APL. On all recent Windows systems, the font "Arial Unicode MS" contains a full set of APL characters. Linux systems also seem to be able to display Unicode APL characters without installing additional fonts. They may not be as pretty as the vendor-supplied fonts, but they are readable.
Most web browsers support UTF-8 and this is making it straightforward to display APL chars on web pages, see for example http://www.dyalog.com/help/html/atomic%20vector.htm (not sure this works in Firefox yet, some browsers are pickier than IE when it comes to downloading fonts). There is still a bit of confusion caused by web and e-mail applications not always use the right encodings or assuming special meanings for particular code points, but in a historical perspective, the problems with displaying APL will be something that we can look back on as a "brief hiccup" :-) There is a related trend towards storing APL code in script files, now that text editors, file compare&merge tools, and source code management systems (we use SubVersion) are also getting comfortable with UTF-8. Morten -----Original Message----- From: Raul Miller [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 27. december 2007 05:50 To: Chat forum Subject: Re: [Jchat] J readability On Dec 26, 2007 11:16 PM, Randy MacDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > That APL source code is in a hard-to-extract format, a workspace, seems > to me a red herring. The symbols shoehorned into the ANSI characters of > text-mode DOS were no big deal either: I still think of "square root" > as "rho" and "gamma" as "iota" Ok, but I tried to get a friend to read some APL code I had written, which I thought was pretty simple and illustrated a point. He did not want to have to install any new fonts, and when I said I could send him an image, he just flat out refused, and that was the end of that conversation. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
