Re: wrapping behavior

Glynn> OTOH, a lot of code uses units of character cells, 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. 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. 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). 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. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.