I liked APL chars and especially APL functionality. I never did associate the chars as being a solution. I actually very early on began to see them as something of a problem. I especially became very frustrated about the APL chars being a problem when I could not combine APL2 and REXX nor APL2 and ISPF nor APL2 and DCCF as would have been a bonus for all of them and I think the chars was a principle problem then. From then on I have always considered the APL chars as a liability. A very long time ago I thought Unicode would save APL but that was a very long time ago and some people still look at Unicode as something that might save APL and if it has not saved APL these last few decades I do not think it ever will. In a way Unicode is good but it is still a long way of becoming a general solution. Even the way Unicode is handled in many products including J is pretty much as an afterthought. I am having problems with Notepad and GTK editing of files and I never know unless I really investigate if the blank chars are in some ASCII or if one or the other has mixed in some Unicode chars. At least the APL chars are supposed to be visible even though on most terminals and in most fonts they are just displaying as squares. I got a PC with 370 emulation card within IBM and I installed APL2 on it. I never got the chars to work on it. I never understood the battles within IBM and some people loved APL but others hated it and IBM was on a suicide mission with APL and I never understood why.
2011/11/2 Roger Hui <[email protected]> > The thing with APL characters is that ... sooner or later you're going > to need a special font (due to new characters being added). I don't > have the resources to keep track of which pages only have the _old_ > APL chars and which have _new_ APL chars. In addition, just because > you can see the APL characters doesn't mean the characters on the page > look the way the way the author(s) intended. It depends on the > vagaries of miscellaneous settings on your machine. For example, ∇ > and ⍷ look like del and epsilon underbar on my machine, and I _have_ > the APL385 font installed, but they still look bigger than the other > chars, sometimes much bigger. > > So ... the first step is to _require_ the APL385 font. If there are > still problems, "To resolve (or at least explain) problems with > displaying APL characters see ...". > > I don't want to have a big discussion on APL chars. Y'all should use J ☺. > > > > On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 3:51 AM, Boyko Bantchev <[email protected]> wrote: > >> The text requires the APL385 Unicode font ... > > > > Does it really require, or should it actualy read ‘may require’? > > It seems I can see all APL characters at least on Ubuntu or WinXP > > with Firefox without the APL385 font installed. I guess it is the same > > on other systems. Am I missing something? > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Björn Helgason, Verkfræðingur Fornustekkum II 781 Hornafirði, t-póst: [email protected] gsm: +3546985532 twitter: @flugfiskur http://groups.google.com/group/J-Programming Tæknikunnátta höndlar hið flókna, sköpunargáfa er meistari einfaldleikans góður kennari getur stigið á tær án þess að glansinn fari af skónum /|_ .-----------------------------------. ,' .\ / | Með léttri lund verður | ,--' _,' | Dagurinn í dag | / / | Enn betri en gærdagurinn | ( -. | `-----------------------------------' | ) | (\_ _/) (`-. '--.) (='.'=) ♖♘♗♕♔♙ `. )----' (")_(") ☃☠ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
