Re: wrapping behavior
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
Yes, this is ancient breakage. What we should do is rip out all
that
code and force it to use pixel metrics. Hard, of course.
Oh boy...
But what about when running on a character-cell terminal?
Glynn> Well, there is such a thing as text which *should* be
Glynn> displayed in a monospaced font, e.g. the output from "ls
Glynn> -l", ps, netstat, od etc,
ls -l output, for example, can easily be parsed to substitute a single
tab for any whitespace.
Except for whitespace occuring in file names, or in date strings. Or
in user names (although yes it's weird but legal to have spaces in
user names in Unix, certain other OSes which support 'ls' do tend to
use them frequently).
That's just ls. Consider the other Unix tools. There's a reason why
cut(1) was invented.
Many "proportional" fonts are deliberately designed so that
each
digits occupies the same fixed width, which basically leaves the
initial modes that need to be done in a fixed-width font. I bet
that most of these would look reasonable run through a filter which
parsed the first line for # of chars to beginning of each field and
heuristically set (pixel-based) tab stops.
Sure you'd have to have a moderately smart shell, but why not? And I
think it would require some additions to XEmacs internals to add
pixel-based tab stops (pixel-based spacing could easily be kludged for
backward compatibility with 1xn xpms using only the transparent color,
of course).
It'd certainly be useful for W3, among other things...
Glynn> ASCII-art, "screen dumps" from curses
programs. While the
Glynn> use of proportionally-spaced text may be increasing,
Glynn> monospaced text is definitely here to stay.
True. However, although I disagree strongly with him, Vladimir's
point is well-taken: it's reasonable to consider defaulting to
proportional fonts.
I wouldn't say that *defaulting* to proportional would be a good
idea. After all, nearly all text editor users expect char cell
fonts. But certainly better *support* for using propotional fonts,
and providing adequate hookage for their effective use would be a very
good idea...
'james
--
James A. Crippen <james(a)unlambda.com> ,-./-. 61.2204N, -149.8964W
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