Re: [9fans] acme fonts

[David Presotto <presotto@closedmind.org>]

Proportionally spaced fonts could be liberating, but don't
seem so in practice.  I find that all of the code lines up
nicely when I use the same font as the author (Rob included).
Perhaps we just need more time to liberate ourselves.

Formatting style goes hand in hand with programming style.
You format to make picking out elements of a program
visually easy.  While ignoring conventions can be liberating, it
can also jarring.

That said, I still think that it is incorrect to have the tools
force everyone to use a constant width font for programming.
Just as I, with my lousy vision, find constant width easier to
read, others prefer the caligraphic beauty of proportional
fonts.   If I wanted all things to line up as the original
author intended, I'ld rather people just put a comment
in their code saying what font it was written in.  It would
be nice if acme just let me point to a font name on the
screen and make executing it (button 2) mean change that window
to that font (or some such mechanism).  Then at least I
could keep tables looking like tables.

Of course, we could instead write programs in a Word/Brutus-like
editor whose output was xml with formatting inserted.  I
find that also way over the top but actually perferable
to forcing constant width fonts on everyone.