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From: pugh@cornell.UUCP (William Pugh)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: X font files - is there any method to the madness?
Message-ID: <8588@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 11-Aug-87 10:33:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.8588
Posted: Tue Aug 11 10:33:07 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Aug-87 02:00:10 EDT
References: <1529@svax.cs.cornell.edu> <870805102857.5.RWS@KILLINGTON.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: pugh@cornell.UUCP (William Pugh)
Distribution: world
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 35

In article <870805102857.5.RWS@KILLINGTON.LCS.MIT.EDU> RWS@ZERMATT.LCS.MIT.EDU (Robert Scheifler) writes:
>
>    Why do some fonts have zero width spaces?
>
>Because a space generally isn't useful for proportional fonts.
>The problem you are really seeing is that most X clients out
>there today only work with fixed-width fonts.
>

I don't understand why you believe that spaces are not useful in
proportional fonts.  If I want to display a line of text in a proportional
font, I don't want zero width spaces.  It may be true that many X programs
are unable to handle proportional fonts.  However, the X implementation
of the Synthesizer Generator here at Cornell does handle proportional fonts
correctly, and we are now in the process of allowing mixed styles and sizes
within a single window and even on a single line.  To do this correctly,
we need to know how wide a space should be, and we need to know where
the baseline of each font is.


	Bill Pugh

P.S. - the Synthesizer Generator is a system that takes a formal 
	specification for a language-directed editor and produces
	an editor for the language.  The editor is specificied as
	a grammar for the language to be edited, attribute grammar
	rules to specify context sensitive information, and details
	relating to the parsing, display and transformations of edited
	programs.  The principles on the project are Thomas Reps
	and Tim Teitelbaum.
-- 
Bill Pugh
Cornell University
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607-255-4934/257-6994