Re: Monospaced font

On 2/11/2018 10:53 AM, George Hovey wrote:
> @Gottfried Barrow
>
> 'Monospaced' is not a font, but a characteristic of a font, 
> specifically that all its characters occupy the same visible width, 
> whether it be '.' or 'W'.  [The contrasting characteristic is 
> 'proportional'.]

George,

Thanks for the reply. In the last couple of days, my understanding of 
fonts/Unicode has gone from mostly-zero to knowing-a-little.

Your reply brings up the issue that huge confusion surrounds Unicode. I 
know that 'monospaced' is monspaced, but in the jEdit 'Font Selector' 
window, a font named 'Monospaced' shows up under 'Font Family'. I attach 
an image showing that. (Another reject I cancelled. Max is 30Kb and I 
was 38Kb.)

I know from the past that Windows fonts are under 'C:/Windows', and I 
did a search on '.ttf', but nothing obvious came up to show me where the 
'Monospaced' font family is coming from. That's why I was asking 
specifically, "What is this 'Monospaced'?"

>
> Unicode is not a fraud, it is one of the wonders of modern technology 
> and is the result of a vast amount of head scratching by academics and 
> others.

I know that Unicode is great for Russians, the Chinese, and Arabic 
speakers, but I'm an English speaker who wants dingbats, and a big suite 
of mathematical looking symbols. Real magic is when "things just work." 
With Unicode, that's not the case yet. ASCII just works. Hopefully, the 
use of Unicode will get some kind of consistency to it.

A really bad kind of bliss is when you're impressed with how something 
looks on your PC, but it looks terrible on other people's PC, and you 
don't know, and they don't tell you. That can happen when fonts aren't 
embedded in a PDF.

>
> You complain about characters being 'missing' from Unicode fonts. 
> Understand that even the 'basic' Unicode set contains 65,536 'glyphs' 
> (the actual visible rendering of a character), so practical fonts 
> contain only a subset of these that are of interest for a particular 
> use (do you need your font to contain Urdu?).  What Unicode does do is 
> to standardize the location of a given character (of, say, Urdu) 
> within the Unicode table no matter who produced the font. This means 
> you can change fonts painlessly, assuming both contain the glyphs you 
> want.

Contesting your 'change fonts painlessly' would require massive words on 
my part, to explain the massive frustration I've felt at Unicode, 
because it's been such a mystery.

One big problem is not when it's not "me changing fonts." An example is 
how I've tried to use non-ASCII symbols in HTML, or Markdown, and 
they've displayed good in one, but not the other, of Chrome and Firefox.

But I can talk about "me changing fonts" in jEdit. So if Unicode is a 
standard that I can use, then when I go through the font families, and 
look at the different Unicode blocks with 'Character Map', then why do I 
see very different symbols show up in the same block? It's 
understandable when I see white boxes because glyphs haven't been 
implemented, but different glyphs? Where's the standard in that?

My guess is that some font families, that show up in jEdit (the Windows 
fonts), aren't designed for UTF-8.

However, the most ridiculous difference that sometimes happens in Chrome 
and Firefox is when the 'leftward/rightward white triangles' have 
opposite directions in Firefox and Chrome. Because of that kind of 
stuff, I finally a rule: don't try to get too fancy with those great 
looking Unicode symbols.

But with predictability in jEdit, I can get fancy.

>
> I gather you would be satisfied with a Windows solution.  You are in 
> luck because Windows gives you a license to use (BUT NOT DISTRIBUTE!) 
> their 'Consolas' monospaced font [see its Wikipedia entry] which is a 
> programmer's dream for legibility (it also has a slashed zero).  It is 
> one of their proprietary 'ClearType' fonts which render effectively at 
> quite small sizes.  jEdit loads it readily from its font list.

At a minimal, I wanted to make sure that the font I chose in jEdit, on 
Windows, wouldn't someday just disappear. Okay, it's not that simple. On 
Windows, you can install fonts, right? But, as a matter of principle, I 
work hard to come up with portable solutions, for a number of reasons. 
No install EXE. Just unzip it.

I've known nothing much about fonts other than all my Windows life fonts 
mysteriously come and go, depending on the Windows version, and the 
particular program, and the history of installations I've been doing.

My questions have not been as an individual user of jEdit. As an 
individual Windows user, I make a program work, or I abandon it. I'm 
trying to distribute jEdit configured for a particular font, that 
provides a good set of symbols, using the UTF-8 encoding.

I quicky looked at the Consolas, but it doesn't have the big set of 
symbols that 'DejaVu Sans Mono' has, like dingbats. I look at these 
things with the 'Character Map' plugin.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I went through the list on 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monospaced_typefaces

I'm pretty sure the answer is https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/

Text is really smooth, and it has many more symbols that other fonts.

I've decided I need to buy a Macbook Air so I can test these things on 
the Mac.

Regards,
GB

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