Re: [9fans] Acme fonts

[Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com>]

On 7/22/20, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 7:22 PM Anthony Martin <ality@pbrane.org> wrote:
>
>> Russ, what did you do to that poor little Acme?! ☺
>>
>> Did you take the less daunting route using
>>
>>  - a combined font file with shapes for normal, italic, bold, etc. and
>>  - a filter to offset runes into "planes" for each font shape?
>>
>
> Yes, that's what I did. Completely awful - the text being displayed isn't
> usable as text. You can tell because when I double-click on the modified
> text acme doesn't know where the word boundaries are and ends up
> highlighting across punctuation that it normally wouldn't.

Remembering a discussion on 9fans where I suggested that capital
letters ought to be a different font, not a unique glyph (Russian, for
example, I believe just changes the font size, which we know is a
different font), I think Russ's is an excellent solution, given those
8 bits between 24 and 32 that one can abuse for the purpose.

It does mean that acme needs some way to extend its grasp of
delimiters into the extended fonts. Solving that without resorting to
a total separation between input and rendering, would be a winner, but
I am not competent enough to know if it is even remotely possible.

Incidentally, I opted for a tag line that looks like this:

     "... Snarf Undo Put  |Fmt |q |f78 look |b |e Font"

where I use "b" and "e" /bin commands to generate time stamps in my
"notepad" document. The details don't seem worth going into, "q", if I
remember right, is straight out of Russ's $home/bin/rc from years back
(with "g" which I have yet to enhance correctly to work on ".go"
directories). I got my inspiration remembering that a friend and
colleague (Windows user) adopted single letter command for all sorts
of shortcuts he memorised and even changed in different contexts.

The temptation to add a vertical edge to each acme window with a
single letter in little blocks - lower case and possibly capitals - is
only resisted by my reluctance to tackle a task I may not be
sufficiently competent to complete.

And for other ".go" developers, how many of you have found renaming a
module from ".go" to ".no" a practical approach to get it,
temporarily, perhaps, out of the way of the compiler?

Lucio.

PS: Sorry about the off-topic diversion. I do happen to be marvelling
over fonts among many other distractions from my day job. I still
don't quite have a proper understanding, so I get odd results when I
try to do anything creative,  but not everything is a failure,
thankfully.

PPS: Like Forsyth, I like the io/fs idea. I like "generics" a lot
less, and I find go modules (sorry, Russ) quite incomprehensible
<sigh!>.