Re: A few observations regarding tbl

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2021-06-19T12:39:37-0400, T. Kurt Bond wrote:
> I looked, and couldn't find a free monospace font with both OPEN BOX
> and CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T.  Well, I exclude Unifont, because
> I don't think it is adequate for use in print.

It definitely is not.

> My search wasn't exhaustive; does anybody else know of one?

I don't, but you might reach out to Steve White, stevan dot white at
that gmail place.  I contacted him earlier this year about some glyph
bugs and he was startlingly responsive.  Feel free to tell him that I
urged you contact him.

But personally I find the circled T somewhat distracting in spite of its
Unix Room pedigree (when it's manufactured by overstriking, it seems
that the "T" is seldom placed within the circle without ugly overlap).
In groff documentation we already use a right arrow for this purpose; it
is more reliably covered by fonts.

$ git grep 'indicate a tab'
doc/groff.texi:We have used an arrow @arrow{} in the above to indicate a tab 
character.
doc/ms.ms:a right arrow (\[->]) is used to indicate a tab character in the 
input.

Admittedly, I originated both of these instances.

> So you can substitute a space for something with .tr, but not
> something for a space?  I did not expect that.

That does indeed seem to be the case.  And no diagnostic is thrown,
either... :-/

> Yes, I've run into applications that substitute leading spaces with
> NO-BREAK SPACE, and have been mystified why code cut and pasted from
> there doesn't work anymore, until I finally looked at the actual
> characters and found NO-BREAK SPACE instead of SPACE.

Yes, this is why I have Vim configured to show me no-break spaces as the
open box glyph.

if &encoding =~ "utf-8"
    set listchars=tab:»–,trail:·,extends:→,precedes:←,nbsp:␣
    if has("conceal")
        set listchars+=conceal:×
    endif
    " set listchars+=eol:¤
else
    set listchars=tab:>-,trail:.,extends:/,precedes:\\,nbsp:_
    if has("conceal")
        set listchars+=conceal:*
    endif
    " set listchars+=eol:$
endif

Regards,
Branden

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