Re: A few observations regarding tbl

[T . Kurt Bond]

On Sat, 19 Jun 2021 17:49:02 -0400,
"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
[...]
> > 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.

Ah, he's the maintainer of the GNU FreeFont.  I'll do that.

> 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.

That seems reasonable.

DejaVuSansMono and FreeMono both have OPEN BOX and RIGHT ARROW.

Interestingly, Courier has RIGHT ARROW, but it is a different width
than the other characters, even though Courier is a monospaced font.

That may not matter for this application.

> > 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.

That makes sense.  I use whitespace-mode in emacs for that.

-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io/