begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 01:29:35PM -0800: > Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > >Ralph Shumaker wrote: > >>I never understood why spaces and tabs cannot be displayed with > >>something visible. > > > >Because a tab is not a printing character, it is a *control* > >character, and its semantics are poorly defined. > > > >Tab is *not* just n spaces. It is "move the head/platen to tab stop" > >and "tab stop" is defined by the end user. > > Be that as it may, that still doesn't address ASCII 032 not having the > option of being visible so as to visually be able to differentiate it > from a tab, on screen that is.
I've used editors where tabs and spaces were visible. It got kind of annoying after awhile. Although, come to think of it, I didn't try using those editors for looking at IAS code. Hm. > On the printouts, I would prefer things > be as they are, except maybe being able to tell the printer to use the > computer's definition of the tab. I think someone mentioned that the > printer *always* uses 8. That was probably me. And it's a default -- some of the old dot-matrix printers, at least, had the ability to "set tabstops", IIRC. [snip] > I'm not so sure I necessarily want "A font for programming must be > monospaced", but the rest of the description sounds great! I like > monospace in email (especially when doing or viewing ASCII art). I like > monospace on the command line, vim, but probably not in Firefox. Heh. If it's not printed, I prefer monospaced. > I'll check it out. > > But I distinctly remember on my Amiga computer being able to modify > fonts myself. And a quick search for "linux font editor" thru Viv?simo, > the first page of 20 results netted 9 pages of interest. I made a few fonts with the Amiga Font Editor. It was fun, and you soon realize that making *good* fonts is not an easy task. Amiga Fonts could also be in color, which made it possible to do a slick version of Rogue... not until the tile-based nethacks came out did I ever see anything similiar on another platform. > But I don't see why any of the other fonts I mentioned should be > untouchable. It would be nice to have all fonts on my system show a dot > or a slash in the zero. It would be nice them all have a very short > horizontal half roof on the left side of a vertical line for the lower > case L (whether it has a base or not, I don't care). It would be nice > for all fonts on my system to have a down sloping half roof on the left > side of a vertical line with a full base for the number one. It would > be nice for them all to have a vertical line with the top half replaced > by a small but visible dot for a lower case I and an upper case I that > looks like the cross section of an I-beam. You mean you want something like: xxx xx xx xxx xx xx xx and xx xx xx xx xx xx xxxxxx ? > But just as nice, I would like to have fonts that have a space (ASCII > 032) that shows something visible on the screen but is invisible in a > printout. Even if tabs don't show anything visible, at least something > visible for ASCII 032 would visually distinguish it from the tab. Changing the font on your system would do that, I would think. [snip] -- The creation of beautiful fonts is magic deep One day, in the pool of metafont I should leap. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
