9fans archive / 1995 / 10 / 59 /    prev next

From: Mikael Cardell mkc@bul...
Subject: acme font
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 03:40:38 -0400

Rob and Howard are correct in that a proportional font gives more
characters on the screen and they both advise me to stick with the
proportional font while programming and to use tab indenting to
make it look good. 

I'm perfectly fine with this advise, and I understand, and perhaps 
agree with it. However, it would be simple to follow this advise if
I was only working with my own code or code written by collegaues
that I can communicate with. As it is, I'm often working with 
code written by others, not known to me. And comments in such
code often rely on a fixed font.

A simple, short example on this is this section, ripped from 
/sys/include/libg.h:

/*
 * Codes for bitblt etc.
 *
 *	       D
 *	     0   1
 *         ---------
 *	 0 | 1 | 2 |
 *     S   |---|---|
 * 	 1 | 4 | 8 |
 *         ---------
 *
 *	Usually used as D|S; DorS is so tracebacks are readable.
 */

I hope you're reading this with a proportional font now. This is
simple enough to be understood even *with* a proportional font,
but I find a lot of examples in other's code that heavily relies on
the use of space characters for indentation in both code and
comments.

Thanks for the tip on the use of Font and B2, by the way.

Mikael Cardell <mkc@bul...>
BOFH @ Telco Solutions, SI&S, Bull Northern Europe
(Do I look like I'm speaking for Bull?)