From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <653c7bb3bdcf917cbe19bdad820368aa@plan9.bell-labs.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] acme fonts From: David Presotto To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 08:17:12 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6e020650-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.