Re: Monospaced font

On 2/11/2018 11:53 AM, George Hovey wrote:
> 'Monospaced' is not a font, but a characteristic of a font

Actually, there is a font named 'Monospaced', although as you say 
'monospaced' is a characteristic of many fonts.

And I agree with you about your other points, specifically wrt Unicode 
(the language Urdu, btw, is covered in the Arabic script block--and I 
have edited that many times with jEdit :-)).  FWIW, Arial Unicode 
attempted to cover more code points than other fonts did, but turned 
into a rather huge font.  And even then it didn't cover CJK code points, 
IIRC.

For the record, there's another monospaced font called "Source Code Pro" 
(https://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/source-code-pro/), which is quite 
legible (zero vs. Oh, el vs. 1, etc.), and comes in many weights.  It 
only covers Latin (extended) script characters.  I use it (the semibold 
weight) in jEdit.

Which brings me to another point: for those of us who need other scripts 
in addition to Latin, jEdit provides the notion of back-up fonts.  On 
the Global Options dialog box, click on 'Text Area', and then click the 
"Additional fonts with font substitution" check box.  You can then add 
additional fonts to your heart's delight; I've added Charis SIL 
(https://software.sil.org/charis/), which includes the Cyrillic script 
(and probably some extended Latin characters that the Source Code Pro 
script doesn't cover, see 
https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/adobe-latin-charsets/blob/master/adobe-latin-1.txt 
vs. http://software.sil.org/charis/support/character-set-support/).  On 
my work computer, I think I've added an Arabic script backup font as 
well.  (jEdit does not support right-to-left display in its buffers, 
although IIRC they show up that way in the find-and-replace dialog. 
That's fine with me, since I don't really read right-to-left...)

I'll close with a couple bugs I know about wrt Unicode support.  First, 
Java does not fully support right-to-left display of the Thaana script 
(used for Dhivehi).  There's a long thread about the issue here: 
https://www.oxygenxml.com/forum/topic6541.html.  At one point, there was 
a bug report about this in Oracle's database; I can't find it any more, 
and I don't know what that means.

The other bug (or unimplemented feature) is more specific to jEdit: you 
can't use the cursor to move through base + diacritic sequences.  The 
cursor instead jumps from one base character to the next, and the 
'Display Character Code' will only show the base character.  This is 
documented here: http://jedit.org/trackers/Bugs/3884.html.

But all in all, I'm pleased with Unicode support.
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    "My definition of an interesting universe is
    one that has the capacity to study itself."
          --Stephen Eastmond

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