[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 09:43:33PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 16:49:34 +0200
> "Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Wednesday, 18 September 2013 at 20:33:10 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > > Plus, they don't include quite enough Unicode glyphs for my 
> > > needs (actually, do they even support unicode at all?!).
> > 
> > not really, I don't think so anyway. They (at least on my box) 
> > have some iso 8859-1 characters, but not beyond that.
> > 
> 
> I've always felt text rendering engines should be able to
> automatically fallback to another font for any characters that aren't
> in the selected font. (Ideally with a user-configurable chain of
> fallbacks, similar to CSS, but selected on a per-character basis.)
> Because showing the right character in a mismatched font has *got* to
> be better than not showing the character at all and a generic "missing
> font" glyph.

Opera actually does this. But sometimes it can backfire, like the time
when my default font didn't contain the glyph for the µ symbol, and
opera used a 5-pixel-wide substitute scaled up to 18 pixels with
horrible, horrible antialiasing artifacts that made it nigh unreadable.

But then again, Opera didn't exactly provide a way to specify the order
of font resolution either, so that didn't help. I agree that *sane*
fallback fonts (with configurable fallback order!) would be much better
than just a black blob of ink (or pixels).


[...]
> > BTW I'm pretty sure Unicode has a few user defined sections that
> > would be ideal for this. You set a bitmap for your user defined
> > characters and then send them right out.
> 
> Unicode even has (experimental, last I checked) pages defined for a
> variety of common (and not-so-common) non-text symbols. The four
> playing card suits, methods of transportation, etc.

That's no longer experimental. Even within the BMP alone (U+0 ..
U+FFFF), there are entire codepages dedicated to symbols, dingbats,
etc.. Any modern Unicode font should have most of these symbols by
default (though unlikely *all* -- there are *that* many of them!).

Better yet, there's the Private Use region that you can map to basically
anything you want, including a range in the BMP (U+E000 .. U+F8FF)
consisting of a whopping 6400 code points. Just the thing you need for
custom bitmaps and other fun stuff. :)


T

-- 
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares? -- Erich Schubert