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Re: [groff] improve a few terminal renderings of special characters


From: Ralph Corderoy
Subject: Re: [groff] improve a few terminal renderings of special characters
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2018 11:11:39 +0100

Hi Ingo,

> > > +.tty-char \[HE] <heart>
> >
> > In the context of playing cards, single capital letters are used is
> > king of clubs, `4D' is four of diamonds.  If listing a hand using
> > `\(CL', etc., it should be approximated using single letters, not
> > the noisy `<club>', over and over.
>
> I used that suggestion in the commit; it seems you are right, these
> symbols are quite unlikely to be used when the context is unclear.

Seeing your `<heart>' got me thinking.  If there's expansions for U+2661
`white heart suit', or U+2665 `black heart suit', etc., then they're
`H'.  An emoji heart would be `<heart>', but there doesn't seem to be a
simple plain obvious heart emoji, but dozens.  :-)

> > Because it's a recent invention and someone just copied the ISO
> > 4127.  Given Pound, `$', and Yen, are in ASCII `L', `$', and `Y', I
> > think `E' should be the approximation.  That's the rendering for
> > epsilon, which is the inspiration for the Euro symbol;  a nod to the
> > Greeks, the `cradle of Europe'.  (The two horizontal lines reinforce
> > the `stability' of the currency, apparently.)  And again, `E' gives
> > a conformant single column when mixing currencies.  I seen it used
> > for this reason elsewhere.
>
> Not sure about that one.  I wouldn't understand 'E' to mean "Euro",
> and i guess that many other continental Europeans wouldn't either.

No, I agree, they wouldn't.  But few will see it?  ASCII and ISO 8859-1
readers?  ISO 8859-15 has a `€' as 0xa4.  Is -15 becoming more common,
replacing -1?  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15

`\z-E' or `\z=E' seems to give a reasonable approximation here and it
does follow tty-char.tmac's

    These definitions are chosen so that, as far as possible, they:
    ...
    - represent the character's graphical shape (not its meaning)

`\z=C' would be better, but the above comment also says

    - work on devices that display only the last overstruck character
      as well as on devices that support overstriking

I suspect context would help make the meaning more clear, and the single
column valuable.

> Anyway, changing this wasn't part of the proposed patch in the first
> place.  :-)

No, you're quite right.

I wonder if John Gardner's HTML-canvas renderer could lay down text in a
dark grey that's additive to what's already there, thus over-striking
would have an effect, e.g. `\z~o' as well as bold.  For plus points,
every glyph placed could have a slight random `jitter' applied to both
its coordinates so bold was also thicker, except around the edges.
Half-line motions would be nice too, John.  ;-)

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy



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