🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec23.082549@eklektix.com> rcd@raven.eklektix.com (Dick Dunn) writes:
> That is, it may appear that stringwidth is cheap under normal circumstances,
> but if you didn't do corresponding show's afterward, it might look more
> expensive.

Agreed, but we're doing this anyway.

> It's easy for the simple case, hard for the semi-sophisticated case, and
> damned-near-impossible for the general case.

I'll buy that, but some meatball AI (clever choice of algorithms) on the
host side can reduce these to cases where the tradeoffs are clearer.

> Is the cost of parsing and managing it separated from the cost of trans-
> mitting it?

Should it be? If the file is physically larger if the host does the
details of the spacing, and this slows things down, does it matter whether
it's the parsing or the transmission?

> >Personally, I would prefer it if programs made decisions like this as late
> >as possible, so I can print a document with a different font (say, my printer
> >doesn't handle Palatino and the company is too cheap to buy a softfont)
> >without screwing things up too badly.

> This would be nice, and it works for simple documents, but how far can you
> carry it?

Pretty far... certainly typical technical documentation is going to be
better off.

> My experience is that it works for *very* simple stuff, but you
> hit the wall before you get all you want.  Here's where it goes:  If you
> chnage the font, you change the line breaking, which requires hyphenation
> on the printer side.

Typically I'm switching between Palatino and Times or New Century Schoolbook,
which are fairly close... close enough that it's only mildly annoying when
I print man pages. I wouldn't want to do it to Courier or title fonts, but I
wouldn't want to set running text in them anyway. Currently, I get soething
like:

	The frobnitz command generates      a five sided    polygon
	in the  interior of the    circle,  if you are using the
	deep mode...

I can get better output from nroff! Just proportionally spacing the words in
the line without any further modification would make the difference between
soething I can use and soething that gives me headaches.

(ideally, the docs should be raw text but that seems to have fallen out of
 favor)

It's like the difference between a program that uses hardcoded paths and one
that uses environment variables. Sure, it takes a little longer to look up
environment variables, but the result is a higher quality program.
-- 
Peter da Silva                                            `-_-'
Ferranti International Controls Corporation                'U` 
Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012 USA
+1 713 274 5180                            "Zure otsoa besarkatu al duzu gaur?"