An interesting editor is at http://www.sourceinsight.com -- it has a fairly extensive selection of options for formatting program text, each of which can be set for a particular category of text. The options include typeface (both fixed-width and proportional), size, boldness, italicism, underlining, all-caps (for display only), strike-through, coloring fore & back, shadowing, inverse, and spacing above/below/expanded. The text types include the usual keyword, comment, directive, and so forth, but break down to the level of each type declaration, type of reference, different comment types, etc. You can download a trial version and play with it to see what it does--the formatting options are under Options | Style Properties. It handles several languages, and more can be defined, but it's definitely C++-oriented.
--- David Pickett [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lindsay Marshall Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 4:38 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: PPIG discuss: Effect of letter casing on readability The one thing that hasn't come up so far is stropping. Stropping is of course not flavour of the month now, but I grew up with it since I started on IMP, a derivative of Atlas Autocode (%BYTEINTEGERARRAYFUNCTIONSPEC which of course also could be written %BYTE %INTEGER %ARRAY %FUNCTION %SPEC). It means no reserved words of course and it makes the stropped words stand out. This may or may not be an advantage depending on the purpose of your reading of the program. I agree with Frank about syntax colouring - it is very helpful when the colours are well chosen. I notice that you usually cannot change the typeface associated with a setting which might also be an interesting thing to try - the danger here is, again as Frank pointed out, that most programmers have the aesthetic sense of a much spreader. I am not suggesting Comic Sans for keywords and Baskerville Old Style for constant - but you could probably use typeface weight quite successfully : light for keywords perhaps, black for constants. It would need experiment. This then also introduces the fixed pitch v variable pitch issue. L. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
