[unifont] Fwd: Is unifont intended to have correct widths for terminal usage?

[Oren Watson]

Forwarding this discussion to the mailing list, for posterity.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Oren Watson <address@hidden>
Date: Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 3:23 PM
Subject: Re: [unifont] Is unifont intended to have correct widths for terminal usage?
To: Paul Hardy <address@hidden>

> Trying to get Unifont to work with programs that expect a monospace font is not the "way forward".  Unifont has been incompatible with such programs from its beginning.  There are plenty of free monospace fonts that are suitable for that purpose.

If by "monospace font" you mean, "font in which non-CJK characters are narrow, and CJK characters are wide", sure. That's what programs expect, not a fully "monospace" font in which all characters have the same width.

If compatibility with terminal emulators is not a goal of your project, why does your project's homepage have a section on how to best configure the Terminal on a Mac for use with your font?

Perhaps you should add a disclaimer explaining that many characters in your font will not work correctly with terminals or ncurses programs unless they are modified and recompiled to work with them. (Which isn't an option for Apple's Terminal.)

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 2:53 PM, Paul Hardy <address@hidden> wrote:

Oren,

On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 9:06 AM, Oren Watson <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Annex 11 points to suggestions, not requirements.  There is a difference.
> Ok, I'll correct myself. Adhering to the suggestions of the Unicode
> standard, Annex 11, as almost all terminal software and monospace fonts do,
> is the way forward.

Trying to get Unifont to work with programs that expect a monospace
font is not the "way forward".  Unifont has been incompatible with
such programs from its beginning.  There are plenty of free monospace
fonts that are suitable for that purpose.