I sent this in yesterday, but didn't see it. My apologies if I have
posted it twice. I have made dots bigger by diddling the font. As long
we are talking of new fonts, this is what I reported in 2009:
As we teach ourselves to read without consciously noticing the
punctuation, it initially bothered me that J relied on easily confused
punctuation characters to perform vastly different functions.
I got around this by downloading a free trial version of Font Creator.
http:\\www.high-logic.com
I then replaced the punctuation characters in Courier New with the same
characters from Courier New Bold. A few characters like curly braces.
exclamation point, apostrophe, and double quotes were widened to make
them more prominent. I saved the new font as J Courier New. It takes
a little getting used to, but I rarely mistake a semicolon for a colon
anymore.
Technically, doing this violates the copyright statement, but I figure
that as long as you have both fonts on your computer anyway and you
don't sell, or exchange the font with anyone, there seems to be little
harm. Win XP had no problem, but Vista doesn't want to recognize the
font. YMMV.
Dave Porter
On 4/10/2013 8:09 PM, William Tanksley, Jr wrote:
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
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