[ENH] Display := when pretty printing ( [sm][et][er][cd]
[approved] )
ducasse
ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Tue Oct 14 08:02:03 UTC 2003
thanks for the explanation and analysis of the problem.
My naive question is why do we have to have graphics such as the arrow
in the method text.
I can understand that for normal roman languages they need graphics for
the letters we used. I can understand that we
need grpahics for advanced environments for kids or whatever but why
the arrow for method definitions. It seems to me that this legacy
complicates a lot the story.
Stef
On Mardi, oct 14, 2003, at 01:01 Europe/Zurich, Richard A. O'Keefe
wrote:
> ducasse <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
> Thanks richard. I do not understand font and related issues but having
> _ or and <- inconsistently is a problem.
> So what would be the solution?
>
> There's a short term solution and a long term solution.
>
> Short term: whichever fonts Squeak is shipped with, FIX THEM so that
> they
> contain exactly the same characters at all supported sizes. This isn't
> just a matter of left and up arrows. For example, just now I started
> up
> an out-of-the-box Squeak 3.5(5180), opened a Workspace, and did
> String streamContents: [:s |
> 32 to: 255 do: [:i |
> s nextPut: (Character value: i)]]
> and Print-It. This gave me a string with printable characters, one
> would
> hope. The font was New York 12. There are about 78 printing
> characters
> above tilde, including a Euro sign. (A Euro is an Australian
> marsupial,
> basically a kind of kangaroo.) Switch from New York 12 to New York 15,
> and there are only 76 printing characters. The Euro has disappeared,
> and
> in place of one of the remaining printing characters there is now a
> blocky
> drawing of a robot, which I must suppose is someone's idea of a joke.
> Switch to New York 18, and the robot has disappeared, being replaced
> by a
> heart sign. Switch to New York 24, and the robot is back, the heart
> gone.
> What's the good of having a Euro sign at only one size? And of course
> the
> set of printing characters in Atlanta is different again.
>
> The variation in supported glyphs is particularly obnoxious when the
> characters are part of Squeak's own basic syntax (left and up arrow).
> However, it is so great that the "Apple" fonts make Squeak look silly
> to ordinary users. This is why so much effort has been put into things
> like the Accu fonts and TrueType support and the BitStream Vera fonts,
> and why it is so important that this stuff should be provided standard
> in even the minimal image.
>
> It is unfortunate that the BitStream Vera fonts that have been adapted
> to Squeak don't seem to include left arrow or up arrow, or, for that
> matter, a Courier-like font.
>
> Long term: support Unicode. Everson Mono is a Unicode font available
> as shareware from http://www.evertype.com/emono/ (currently 6000
> characters
> are supported). Michael Everson might be sympathetic to including
> this in
> Squeak. Alan Wood's web site (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode) lists a
> lot of fonts for various systems Unix, Windows, MacOS 9, MacOS X), at
> least
> some of which are free. One interesting set is the ClearlyU BDF font
> (http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/cu.html), with >9000 characters. There
> are
> actually quite a few free fonts. With >96 000 characters, Unicode 4 is
> hard to support completely, but hey, 9000 characters is better than the
> approximately 180 we can use in Squeak now.
>
> I don't say it will be easy. I for one would find it very difficult.
> (I have a partly-built Smalltalk compiler and classes, built as an
> exercise
> in understanding the ANSI Smalltalk standard. If ever finished, the
> thing
> will use Unicode. But I've made my life easy by following ANSI's lead
> and
> including no graphics whatsoever...) But we _have_ to go there.
>
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