Re: Questions about 'Monospaced' font Win/Mac/Linux

Mike,

(Short0: Thanks for the comment.)

(Short1: I now have a good solution for my Windows, 
Unicode/font/portable-distribution unpredictability problem.)

(Short2: Unicode is only great when it's great for me. Below, I explain 
why it has now entered back in the realm of great for me.)

Out of the context of "the GB mind," I suppose what I said is a bizarre 
opinion, but the flip side is "Unicode is great." This reflects an 
imperfect world. People put a massive amount of work in creating a 
standard, but then the big players don't cooperate. The result is 
little, generic boxes show up in web pages, rather than nice symbols.

These complaints about Unicode go back to my use of Isabelle/jEdit.

Unicode symbols in Isabelle/jEdit work, but only because Makarius Wenzel 
makes them work in jEdit, for all 3 platforms.

Unicode symbols in Isabelle/jEdit work, but not so much on 
StackOverflow, where people have posted Isabelle questions using 
non-ASCII symbols. Certain arrows didn't display correctly in Chrome, 
but displayed correctly in Firefox. At the time, I guessed that it was a 
security problem, and I finally read about how fonts are low-level 
security stuff.

The problem for Unicode/fonts is predictability. How am I suppose to 
distribute jEdit with software that depends on a particular font, when I 
can't guarantee the font? For Windows, telling people to go get a font 
and install it is absolutely not a solution, because I don't do magic 
Windows installs.

But there's not a problem now. I have a solution that's good enough. 
Partly, I just want to guarantee a predictable, portable setup for 
myself. I'm the #1 user of my stuff. I'm trying to get set up for user #2.

Much of this is about treating code as literature, for my own purposes 
of writing. Call it "Mathematica-lite without all the hassles, cost, and 
proprietary ties."

*SOLUTION*

Get any font that I want and stick it in the JRE 'lib/fonts' folder. The 
Oracle web page says not to do that, but if I'm distributing the JRE, 
and it works for jEdit on Windows, I don't see the problem.

*GREAT FONT*

I have no affiliation with Makarius Wenzel. Thanks go to him for 
pointing me to the DejaVu Fonts:

http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/samples/DejaVuSansMono.pdf

https://dejavu-fonts.github.io

The arrows are a little small, but it's a true monospaced font. With 
some or most monospaced fonts, many graphical symbols aren't actually 
monospaced. Monospaced is necessary to get nice alignment, especially 
with tables.

The image shows the beginning. I assume I can make things look better 
with a mode for the file type, for tweaking the syntax fonts, which I 
don't know how to do yet.

*ISABELLE EXPOSURE*

All my ideas for what I'm trying to do now come from my exposure to 
Isabelle/jEdit, which I use as an execution engine for general 
programming, though initially I used it for proving, which it's very 
powerful at.

For my early experiments here with jEdit, I attach an image of a rough, 
proof-of-concept mockup (I did, but it went to moderation, so I 
cancelled the email).

The basic idea is that I can mix code for multiple languages in one 
file, such as Go, Node.js, Markdown, Beanshell, etc. I also can use my 
own custom syntax in the programming languages, which will get removed.

With macros and shortcuts, I pre-process a section of code, send it to 
disk, and execute it in the jEdit Console. This way, I can work in 
word-processor-ish-mode, instead of traditional IDE mode, where I get 
flooded with open files.

I'm already doing that in Isabelle/jEdit, but it's too big and complex 
to distribute, for people who don't need its proof power.

This will work out or it won't.

This email should finish it for me unless someone asks me a question. 
Talking has helped me solve the problem.

Thanks,
GB


On 2/10/2018 1:36 PM, Mike Maxwell wrote:
> On 2/10/2018 1:28 PM, Gottfried Barrow wrote:
>> Unicode ends up being hype. The standard doesn't end up getting 
>> implemented. 
>
> This isn't the place to argue this point, so I'll just say I find that 
> to be a bizarre opinion.  As a computational linguist, I use Unicode 
> every day, with Latin, Arabic, Tamil, Bengali, Hangul (Korean) and 
> many other scripts, and have not experienced problems with the Unicode 
> standard not being implemented.  Occasional bugs, yes, but no more 
> (and perhaps less) than the bugs I find in other software.  It would 
> be simply dreadful to go back to the pre-Unicode days.

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