Re: miniclock xpm/font (was) A theme...

I like my xpm'd clock ;)

It'd be easy to write one that used fonts though - why not try ?

  -- Matthew


on Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 02:20:41AM -0400, Jay Sekora wrote:
> Erik:
> > > Also re your minitime, I plan to hack minitime, so its themeable by
> > > switching its xpm without recompiling.
> 
> mallum:
> > I figured that was on the way.  Good thing because my build with the
> > other xpm was kind of sloppy.
> 
> It seems to me that the right thing for minitime is just using a font, 
> rather than an xpm (which is a small subset of a font).  Personally, 
> I find the LED-style digits in minitime hard to read.  Since it uses
> an XPM, in order to fix that I need to draw ten digits and a colon 
> in a drawing program.  If I could just change the command-line argument 
> that specified the font that would be easier.  Also, the fact that 
> the XPM only includes a few characters is potentially problematic 
> for the future.  F'rinstance, when you tap on minitime to toggle it to 
> showing the date instead of the time, it separates the date and month
> with a colon, which is a pretty non-standard format.  I'm guessing 
> that was because the pixmap didn't have a hyphen or a slash in it. 
> But that means that you can't tell by glancing at it whether it's 
> showing the date or the time, except by figuring out whether one or 
> the other doesn't make sense.  Moreover, a very logical extension 
> would be to display the month as an abbreviation, so the date is clear 
> on both sides of the pond.  But that requires 8 capital letters and 
> 18 lowercase letters.  Ok, well let's add letters as well as numbers 
> and a little punctuation to the xpm.  Wait - now somebody wants to localize 
> the clock for Greek! :-)  All this would be a lot easier if miniclock 
> just took a font.  I bet there's even a freely-redistributable LED-style 
> TrueType font that we could package and have the minitime ipkg recommend.
> 
> Actually, it occurred to me that an assertion like that needed to 
> be backed up, so I asked Google, and Google gave me:
> 
>     http://www.squaregear.net/fonts/
>         (see LED Real at http://www.squaregear.net/fonts/led_real.shtml;
>         I didn't see examples of digits, though)
>     
>     http://ee.cleversoul.com/fun/fonts.html
>         Liquid Crystal and MiniSystem look good.
> 
> Sure, these are pretty big for an iPAQ, so most people will just use 
> Verdana or Helvetica.  But then, I personally would rather use Verdana
> or Helvetica in the first place, and people who want to use the LED 
> fonts for miniclock might well want to use them for other things as 
> well.
> 
> (Hope this all doesn't sound critical - I'm thrilled with Matchbox, 
> and quite pleased with the tools that come with it.)
> 
> -j.
> 
> -- 
> Jay Sekora             http://www.aq.org/~js/            [email protected]
>                                                          AIM: jayaq
> 
> `[C]orporations have been enthroned. [...]  An era of corruption in
> high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its
> reign by working on the prejudices of the people [...] until wealth is
> aggregated in a few hands [...] and the republic is destroyed.' - Abraham
> Lincoln
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