[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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