monospaced and proportional fonts.
Here it was necessary to make a textbox. It happens to everyone. It took and took, but then the question arose: what kind of fonts to sharpen? Actually, two variants are known in our (from my point of view) computer world: monospaced fonts and proportional fonts.
Suddenly, the problem of choice turned into a headache. For one reason: monospaced fonts give the text an additional property that can be called geometric: once all letters have the same width, then (these are the fruits of a certain amount of research and bullying users, perhaps the facts are known and obvious, but nothing has been managed, so got it yourself)
')
1. In the text, the concept of a column of characters appears, and in general the textbox becomes two-dimensional, and in it you can arrange a very simple text formatting: all hexdumps are formatted with a simple tab. And a very simple navigation, like: draw a picture of the coordinates (familiarity 0, 10).
2.0. simplified text selection with the mouse. When there is a click on the coordinates inside the textbox, it is incomparably easier to calculate to which place in the line this click hit. There, of course, there will be problems with determining where the clicked in memory begins, because the text, naturally, is in utf8, but in the case of proportional fonts, a resource-intensive headache is added to this, because you need to understand what character in the line clicked by the user.
2.1. to get to monospace i is much easier than to proportional.
3.0 read easier. Whatever fans of times new roman may say, but when a word of two letters may look longer than a word of four - it slows down the speed at which information is perceived. In addition, difficulties arise with the recognition of orders of numbers. When 110 can be shorter than 100, it’s hard for the brain to appreciate. Actually, several experiments with psychologists were conducted on this score.
3.1. animation. The clock drawn in the form of 05:40:47 replacing one character does not twitch, does not change its width, which is less surprising for the brain than jerking when changing from 0 to 1 in some Tunga.
3.2. easier to compare texts. For example, two md5 sums. No, of course, you can automatically, but sometimes you are too lazy to run a program, and then hop - posed to the columns of characters - and that's it. hexdumps are easier to read. You can, of course, arrange all the exel-like method, write the required long byte combinations into columns, ascribe the address and so on. But to see the necessary patterns in such printouts turn out to be much more complicated than in printouts that are monospaced, formatted with tabs and spaces. Although, probably, occupational disease played a role in this experience - the subjects were programmers.
3.3. when editing the text, there are no unpredictable jumps from line to line, everything is quite expected: one letter was deleted, the word length was reduced by one unit, one was added - and the length was increased by one. It does not happen that they removed the letter z, the word jumped to the line up, added two ii, and the word did not return to the line down. Greater predictability also relieves brains.
4. I rocked in different alphabets. All, of course, did not see, but all widespread quite fit into monospaced cells. In general, it is understandable, the meaning of a letter is made dependent on its size - it is inhuman (in the sense, people are all different). Moreover, Japanese and Chinese characters seem to be monospaced, because the text must be written both vertically and horizontally.
In general, in my opinion, monospaced fonts have solid pluses, and the only negative is that you cannot write small letters in height on the screen so that it is readable and beautiful. For example, a font with a height of 3 o in capital letters with Cyrillic is hardly possible, because you cram a letter into 3x3. On the other hand, and who needs it? Moreover, with modern printing equipment, everything is vector-based, and you can be shallow, even to thousandths of an inch - you can become shaken up to the full. And on the 3x3 screen, no one reads.
But on the other hand, there is such a person as a designer. At the sight of which, fonts are such polygons (well, they, of course, are not quite polygons, but as a result they turn from splines into them, cf freetype) with which you can draw, describing a picture with a sequence of letters. And polygons, in general, can be completely different, though emoticons, even integrals (this is not about TeX'S like, because something like him with monospaced fonts is good friends. Because earlier mathematical articles typed on typewriters, and formulas entered from hands - it was very convenient to actually format, draw labels and sign charts (according to veterans).
And since any letter can be any, then the developers do not have the right to make the textbox enhanced knowledge of the font width, although the gain and acceleration can be significant.
Eh. Here is such a sad story. We'll have to cheat with scrolling, as well as with notes about long lines, with a choice of a mouse and other delights. It remains to be consoled only that the textbox will be able to draw the lines not only from the letters, but also from any vector figurines, if they are correctly described in some self-made shortcut (by the way, down with the patents :).
As a result, we came to a compromise: the textbox will not be sharpened for monospace fonts, but the first font that these goddamn designers will make to us will have to be monospaced. We finally need to watch hexdumps.
But if you do not have such a capricious public behind you, then you can think about the advantages of monospaced fonts. Above the fact that they give two-dimensional, ascii-art, columns of characters, predictable changes to the text when editing it, and other delights. To think and not to write such fonts into a useless relic of the past.
PS And what does the mysterious phrase of S. Jobs mean 'if I abandoned the course of calligraphy, then perhaps there wouldn’t be monospaced fonts on Macs'?
Suddenly, the problem of choice turned into a headache. For one reason: monospaced fonts give the text an additional property that can be called geometric: once all letters have the same width, then (these are the fruits of a certain amount of research and bullying users, perhaps the facts are known and obvious, but nothing has been managed, so got it yourself)
')
1. In the text, the concept of a column of characters appears, and in general the textbox becomes two-dimensional, and in it you can arrange a very simple text formatting: all hexdumps are formatted with a simple tab. And a very simple navigation, like: draw a picture of the coordinates (familiarity 0, 10).
2.0. simplified text selection with the mouse. When there is a click on the coordinates inside the textbox, it is incomparably easier to calculate to which place in the line this click hit. There, of course, there will be problems with determining where the clicked in memory begins, because the text, naturally, is in utf8, but in the case of proportional fonts, a resource-intensive headache is added to this, because you need to understand what character in the line clicked by the user.
2.1. to get to monospace i is much easier than to proportional.
3.0 read easier. Whatever fans of times new roman may say, but when a word of two letters may look longer than a word of four - it slows down the speed at which information is perceived. In addition, difficulties arise with the recognition of orders of numbers. When 110 can be shorter than 100, it’s hard for the brain to appreciate. Actually, several experiments with psychologists were conducted on this score.
3.1. animation. The clock drawn in the form of 05:40:47 replacing one character does not twitch, does not change its width, which is less surprising for the brain than jerking when changing from 0 to 1 in some Tunga.
3.2. easier to compare texts. For example, two md5 sums. No, of course, you can automatically, but sometimes you are too lazy to run a program, and then hop - posed to the columns of characters - and that's it. hexdumps are easier to read. You can, of course, arrange all the exel-like method, write the required long byte combinations into columns, ascribe the address and so on. But to see the necessary patterns in such printouts turn out to be much more complicated than in printouts that are monospaced, formatted with tabs and spaces. Although, probably, occupational disease played a role in this experience - the subjects were programmers.
3.3. when editing the text, there are no unpredictable jumps from line to line, everything is quite expected: one letter was deleted, the word length was reduced by one unit, one was added - and the length was increased by one. It does not happen that they removed the letter z, the word jumped to the line up, added two ii, and the word did not return to the line down. Greater predictability also relieves brains.
4. I rocked in different alphabets. All, of course, did not see, but all widespread quite fit into monospaced cells. In general, it is understandable, the meaning of a letter is made dependent on its size - it is inhuman (in the sense, people are all different). Moreover, Japanese and Chinese characters seem to be monospaced, because the text must be written both vertically and horizontally.
In general, in my opinion, monospaced fonts have solid pluses, and the only negative is that you cannot write small letters in height on the screen so that it is readable and beautiful. For example, a font with a height of 3 o in capital letters with Cyrillic is hardly possible, because you cram a letter into 3x3. On the other hand, and who needs it? Moreover, with modern printing equipment, everything is vector-based, and you can be shallow, even to thousandths of an inch - you can become shaken up to the full. And on the 3x3 screen, no one reads.
But on the other hand, there is such a person as a designer. At the sight of which, fonts are such polygons (well, they, of course, are not quite polygons, but as a result they turn from splines into them, cf freetype) with which you can draw, describing a picture with a sequence of letters. And polygons, in general, can be completely different, though emoticons, even integrals (this is not about TeX'S like, because something like him with monospaced fonts is good friends. Because earlier mathematical articles typed on typewriters, and formulas entered from hands - it was very convenient to actually format, draw labels and sign charts (according to veterans).
And since any letter can be any, then the developers do not have the right to make the textbox enhanced knowledge of the font width, although the gain and acceleration can be significant.
Eh. Here is such a sad story. We'll have to cheat with scrolling, as well as with notes about long lines, with a choice of a mouse and other delights. It remains to be consoled only that the textbox will be able to draw the lines not only from the letters, but also from any vector figurines, if they are correctly described in some self-made shortcut (by the way, down with the patents :).
As a result, we came to a compromise: the textbox will not be sharpened for monospace fonts, but the first font that these goddamn designers will make to us will have to be monospaced. We finally need to watch hexdumps.
But if you do not have such a capricious public behind you, then you can think about the advantages of monospaced fonts. Above the fact that they give two-dimensional, ascii-art, columns of characters, predictable changes to the text when editing it, and other delights. To think and not to write such fonts into a useless relic of the past.
PS And what does the mysterious phrase of S. Jobs mean 'if I abandoned the course of calligraphy, then perhaps there wouldn’t be monospaced fonts on Macs'?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/12503/
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