On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 3:29 PM, David MacQuigg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have tried a few of the dozens of fonts in IDLE, but found none better than > the default Fixedsys. This must be the one they optimized for IDLE. In > other tools, like TextPad, I prefer Courier New, but it is surprisingly BAD > in IDLE! I guess there really is no standard line weight, or whatever, for > "Courier New". It all depends on how it is tweaked for a particular program. > Then there's the whole discussion of fonts, what's TrueType (ttf), can you use those in Linux, how to install, what's different on Mac and so forth. Programmers concerned with fonts in end user documents, such as when synthesizing PDFs on the fly with ReportLab, need to know which fonts do or don't support which Unicode codepoints. Python is legitimately invested here, so depending on the type of programming course, we might justify the time. > As for offering students dozens of fonts, I say too many fonts are at best a > distraction, at worst a source of ambiguity as to what symbol is actually > intended. Find a font that will clearly distinguish the characters O0l1Z2S5, > and stick with it. We are teaching programming, not website design. Fixed > width is the most readable, and essential for tables and indented code, but a > compact (proportional-spaced) font like Arial, can add 50% more text on a > page. The gain for code is much less, because most lines are shorter than > the page width. > I'm finding it easier to bring a new TrueType font into IDLE on Windows than on Ubuntu, despite having added a softlink from a subdirectory returned by xset -q into /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-misc, where I've got my font. Wing-101 and OpenOffice are having no trouble finding it. I'll keep noodling. Getting more font savvy is an important step when coding mostly outside of Latin-1, a favorite way to get into Python in some schools and/or math labs. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
