"Vladimir G. Ivanovic" <vladimir(a)acm.org&gt; writes: No, I like it the way it is. Sometimes you want to have one long line even if wordwrap is on (e.g. posting Sourcecode in an E-Mail). Therefor I really wouldn't like it if XEmacs did play on inserted linebreaks and it shouldn't refill when inserting a line in the middle of an other. Keep it exactly as it is. M-q isn't much work but fiddling around to get the original layout after a refill is. -- One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Vladimir> Ignore for a second the content of Ben's posting and Vladimir> look at the formatting (hopefully some hook won't wrap Vladimir> his lines when I send this message). I don't know of a Vladimir> way to have XEmacs automatically wrap these long Vladimir> lines. Is there a way? Use Gnus, the feature is "wash word wrap" (W w). Vladimir> Do other people think this is an issue? Yes, but unfortunately Microsoft et al are not about to fix their broken MUAs. Kyle is unlikely to be willing to break his conformant MUA, so I doubt that VM has a similar feature. :-) Vladimir> The other is not being able to handle multiple, Vladimir> proportionally spaced fonts on a single line along with Vladimir> different styles (bold, italic, etc.) What do you mean by "not handle"? -- 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.

Sounds like this is where a user option is needed. BTW, I don't think the solution is for XEmacs to _add_ linebreaks, but for the display code to be smart enough to wrap. --- Vladimir ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Vladimir G. Ivanovic http://leonora.org/~vladimir 2770 Cowper St. vladimir(a)acm.org Palo Alto, CA 94306-2447 +1 650 678 8014 The lyfe so short, the craft so long to learne. -- Chaucer

Neato. Seems to work. Thanks. --- Vladimir ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Vladimir G. Ivanovic http://leonora.org/~vladimir 2770 Cowper St. vladimir(a)acm.org Palo Alto, CA 94306-2447 +1 650 678 8014 The lyfe so short, the craft so long to learne. -- Chaucer

Vladimir> The other is not being able to handle multiple, Vladimir> proportionally spaced fonts on a single line along with Vladimir> different styles (bold, italic, etc.) Vladimir> How do I create and display text that has "Times Roman" Vladimir> in Times Roman and "Helvetica" in Helvetica? There are a number of alternatives, depending on your application. XEmacs is not a wordprocessor, and it is unlikely to become one any time soon. I don't think any of the developers have much interest in doing that, and creating a redisplay that could handle accurate positioning, pagination, and all the rest would have to be done from scratch. It would not be hard to produce something that allows you produce Memopad-quality printed output most of the time, and not too much harder to do as well as Memopad all the time. But I don't think there are very many Emacs users who care. Most people who use Emacs prefer to use a real text justifier like TeX or troff for camera-ready copy, HTML for web pages, and so on. If you really want WYSIWYG, use Word or Framemaker or one of the *nix compatibles. If you want a semi-realistic display in XEmacs of what LaTeX will do very nicely, you can use preview-latex or AUC-TeX and customize the faces they use. PSGML will do the same for *ML documents. And if you just want to do it in XEmacs (progn (make-face 'tr "Times-Roman") (set-face-font 'tr "-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15") (make-face 'hv "Helvetica") (set-face-font 'hv "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15") (let ((here (point)) tre hve) (insert "Times-Roman") (setq tre (make-extent here (point))) (set-extent-face tre (find-face 'tr)) (insert " ") (setq here (point)) (insert "Helvetica") (setq hve (make-extent here (point))) (set-extent-face hve (find-face 'hv)))) does the trick. (The Windows version of the font name would be more compact, but otherwise the code is the same.) Granted, it wouldn't be hard (merely tedious) to cook up a library to allow you to do that operation the same way that Memopad allows you to do it. Why do we make it so "hard"? Because that's not what XEmacs is for. Typically the more complex text processing tasks already involve setting extents to delimit logical units of text, so you don't need to make an extent, just grab the appropriate one. And logical units (such as emphasis or comment or docstring) can be shared among applications, so such common semantics typically already have faces associated with them. -- 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.

Vladimir> I noticed that Mozilla flows monospaced text perfectly Vladimir> in its message composition window. It does the same thing to patches. No, thanks. Vladimir> The problem is that the world is moving away from Vladimir> monospaced text editors and toward multi-font, Vladimir> proportionally spaced text with embedded graphics, etc. Good for the world. But so what? I don't object to the use of "multimedia", even in the simple form of a proper italic face for emphasis, instead of /slashes/ or _underscores_. Of course, I don't see either of those in email, because Gnus washes them into italics automatically. Graphics are good, so are audio and video clips. But what I've experienced so far suggests that the text:format ratio is the single best indicator, after author identity, of whether I want to pay attention or not. It doesn't have to be that way, but sadly enough, it is. Vladimir> I find it painful to read and answer an HTML-formatted Vladimir> email message with XEmacs+MH-E. So use Gnus or VM to read it as HTML. If you want mh-e to wash your HTML mail into something good-looking, talk to the mh-e people. It's not an XEmacs problem. Nor is message composition. Vladimir> XEmacs and TeX are similar in that part of their Vladimir> internal models are obsolete. How can they be obsolete? They're exactly what I want. ;-) Vladimir> Why should we read monospaced text? So change the default font, already. Vladimir> Isn't that just a holdover from ASR-33 teletype Vladimir> machines, just like 80x24 is? No. As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as "monospaced text." Text is a stream of characters. How you choose to format and display that may be monospaced or proportional, bidirectional or vertical. If you don't want text presented in a monospaced face, don't have it presented that way. Set your default face to use font Times Roman or Helvetica. A lot of people do exactly that for their mail and news buffers. Although I think text/plain in Times looks pretty good, I don't use that option. The mail and news that's important to me often contains code or patches; it's useful for that to be monospaced. Vladimir> We don't use monospaced type when we set books, and the Vladimir> typography of Don Knuth's code (not the literate Vladimir> programming stuff, just the code) in his book MMIXware Vladimir> is pleasantly readable. Books are rather hard to run grep(1) on though, aren't they? That evidently doesn't matter to you. It's extremely important to me. Vladimir> Why should my choice of width and margins be your choice Vladimir> of width and margins? Because nobody implements RFC 2646, which would make both of us happy. In particular, my precious patches would not get wrapped, while your text (including quoted lines in messages) could be flowed if you chose to display it that way. Vladimir> P.S. It's Notepad, not Memopad. In Japanese, it's Memopad. -- 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.

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.

James> Also note that many Asian languages, with Chinese, James> Japanese, and Korean as ideal examples, prefer monospaced James> characters. However, for practical purposes they only occur on bitmapped terminals anymore. James> very complex and hard to apply kerning be done to only James> certain classes of characters (punctuation, kana, roomaji, James> etc). It's not that hard; I don't know the rules, but it mostly only matters for vertical writing and romaji. James> Also word-wrapping is a very touchy subject in CJK text as James> therearenospacesbetweenwordswhichcanconfusetradtionalwordwrappingalgorithms. James> (Try M-q'ing that.) Try C-h a'ing "kinsoku". Currently partly disabled, because as usual the Japanese support was hacked in on the assumption that nobody else would ever use Mule. :-( James> Suffice to say that although many people like antialiased James> text Antialiasing is extremely important to pleasant display of ideographs, though. -- 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.