Tracy Harms <[email protected]> wrote: > Making the dots bigger might help a lot. Here's an idea that might be > relatively simple: have a J tokenizer active during typing, and every > inflected graphic primary gets changed so that the dots are both enlarged > and overlaid on the graphic. By "overlaid" I mean the result is a single > character with an appearance of the graphic and its (enlarged) inflections > squished together.
This is what I was referring to by mentioning Unicode overstrike; some fonts actually include many of the graphemes we'd need (and perhaps ALL of them), written in a way that hundreds of years of experience proves is human-readable, and when J or your editor emits the base character, the overstrike character, and then the inflection character, the Unicode renderer that's part of your OS will automatically pick the human-designed font character that deliberately combines the two. If we can find the right font, then, the coding task should be very simple, at least for 90% of the problem (which is fine for a proof-of-concept). Oh, I see that someone asked whether I meant that people should have to type an overstrike character (like in APL). Oops, no. I meant that people would only type normal J, and the editor would automatically render the result. Again, this would probably be nothing more than a proof-of-concept. I'm sure we'd find that some J tokens would wind up being best represented by glyphs other than the simple overstrike, and some won't have a Unicode representation (and so we'd HAVE to think of another solution). Fun! -Wm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
