At 9:36 -0500 2/1/2000, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
>As we find ourselves adding new fonts to Squeak (in part for aesthetic reasons, in part for licensing purposes), we are running into issues related to the fact that each font encodes "special glyphs" differently, and some fonts don't have these special glyphs at all.  It would be a good idea if we could adopt a standard encoding for Squeak Fonts, so to aid those converting new fonts for Squeak.

Yes!

>Squeak typically wants to have "straight line" single and double quotes, the underbar replaced with the assignment glyph, the caret replaced with the return glyph and so forth.  In TimesRoman, the original characters were "tucked into" an empty space in the font glyphs array.

I think it would be nice to balance Squeak's needs against what fonts come with and are usually expected to contain.

Possibly we could mark the specially encoded fonts ('Sq' preface???) and use then for code-related things. Applications are probably better done with stock fonts; a row of left arrows in a web page will look very odd when a row of underscores is expected.

>As an aside, I'd really prefer if Squeak displayed "SOMETHING" to indicate that a non-printing character was struck.  Many times I have accidentally typed a control character or the like, which didn't display but was present in a string or symbol.  If outside of a literal, you simply get a confusing syntax error, but it does damning things elsewhere.  This could be accomplished simply by adding a "marker" character, leaving no empty spaces in the glyphs Form.

There is a font someplace (and I have a copy someplace) which shows the hex encoding for the character as its glyph: two small hex numbers, the first raised to the top left of the glyph and the other at the right bottom. It might be better to have at least one font encoded both ways since only us programmers tend to care what the code for XON is.

>...

Dave
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David N. Smith
IBM T J Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY
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