[Cuis-dev] Making Cuis Unicode-only and VectorGraphics-only. (was Re: Alternative arrows)

[Gerald Klix]

Hi Juan,

please see below.

On 18.10.22 21:02, Juan Vuletich wrote:
> Hi Luciano,
> 
> I also think it would be good to make this configurable. It is also bad 
> that I hardcoded this in the plugin, making it harder to change.
> 
> Still, this opens a different discussion. Something I have been thinking 
> about, but hadn't talked about in the list.
> 
> Now that the VectorEnginePlugin is in the official VMs, it means we can 
> count on it. 
In theory yes, I presume the life-typing-VM may suffer,
but IHMO that's a side issue.

While the VectorEnginePlugin is fast enough for medium size
monitors, I often experience noticeable, sometimes annoying delays,
when I use it. (I know, my bad:
Display boundingBox ->  0 at 0 corner: 4320 at 3840).
“Annoying” mean, I loose input keystrokes.
It clearly becomes better, when less text has to be displayed
and it stays bad, once I had a stack-overflow (there is at
least one memory leak caused by stack overflows, but
that's a different story).

In a nutshell: I would love to help to make vector graphics
faster!

> So, what I want to do is to make the "Use Unicode" 
> preference the default and only behavior, and actually remove support 
> for ISO 8859 files (and StrikeFonts, and a lot of the older stuff). And 
> if everything is Unicode, then there's no need to have these special 
> glyphs for $_ and $^. We could use instead a real Unicode left arrow for 
> assignment, and just remove support for $_ for assignment. (Using := 
> would still be possible). All this "Smalltalk-80 glyphs" kludge would go 
> away.
That would be cool!
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> If we decide to go in this direction, it may make sense to temporarily 
> disable the "Smalltalk-80 glyphs", at least if you want to use the 
> Unicode arrows for something else.
Does that mean, I will see underscores in this phase?
Hopefully not.
I confess, I did not know, that there is another assignment operator
than “:=” before I used Cuis :»
> 
> Opinions?
I will test VectorGrahics tomorrow, with a clean image
and try to do some measurements. Until then I am undecided.

> 
> On 10/17/2022 6:20 AM, Luciano Notarfrancesco via Cuis-dev wrote:
>> Perhaps instead of the useST80Glyphs boolean in Tahoe displayUtf32: 
>> method we could pass a translation table, a WordArray with pairs of 
>> code points to replace when displaying. Juan, what do you think?
>>
>> On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 at 13:06 Luciano Notarfrancesco 
>> <luchiano at gmail.com <mailto:luchiano at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     I changed those methods but still couldn’t get it to work. Now I
>>     see this is hardcoded in the VectorEngine plugin. Juan, could we
>>     make this configurable?
>>
>>     On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 at 04:23 Gerald Klix <cuis.01 at klix.ch
>>     <mailto:cuis.01 at klix.ch>> wrote:
>>
>>         On 16.10.22 22:54, Luciano Notarfrancesco wrote:
>>         > I don’t mean to change the current behavior. I just would
>>         like that the
>>         > user could easily choose the code points of the glyphs to be
>>         used for those
>>         > characters. Right now they are hardcoded in TTFFontReader
>>         and VectorEngine.
>>         > As a preference they would be more flexible, but I can just
>>         change those
>>         > methods in my image for now. I’m using all DejaVu Sans and
>>         the thick arrows
>>         > look nice.
>>         Yes, that was my initial impression; I even started
>>         to write an encouraging E-mail.
>>         Then I tried some other fonts and discovered that the fonts
>>         mentioned below do not have the necessary glyphs.
>>
>>         Perhaps a dictionary that maps the font-name to code-point
>>         substitution mapping, would be a general solution.
>>         Actually we also have to look at the syntactic context ...
>>
>>         Anyway, I like the thicker arrows that DejaVu provides
>>         and I am willing to help to find a solution.
>>         >
>>         > On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 at 03:38 Gerald Klix <cuis.01 at klix.ch
>>         <mailto:cuis.01 at klix.ch>> wrote:
>>         >
>>         >> Luciano,
>>         >>
>>         >> I see your problem,
>>         >> but these Characters only have glyphs in the
>>         >> DejaVu, JetBrainsMono, KiwiMaru and KurintoSans fonts.
>>         >>
>>         >> To make this work properly, we need some means
>>         >> to discover the aforementioned situation
>>         >> and switch back to the current behavior.
>>         >>
>>         >>
>>         >> Sorry and HTH,
>>         >>
>>         >> Gerald
>>         >>
>>         >>
>>         >> On 06.10.22 12:55, Luciano Notarfrancesco via Cuis-dev wrote:
>>         >>> What do you think about adding two preferences to set the
>>         unicode
>>         >>> characters to be used for displaying ^ and _? The problem
>>         I’m having is
>>         >>> that the arrows that we currently use are the same that
>>         are commonly used
>>         >>> in mathematics for morphisms, and the code gets a bit
>>         confusing in my
>>         >>> system, so I’d like to use the thick arrow 16r2B05 for _
>>         and 16r2B06 for
>>         >> ^,
>>         >>> and to avoid annoying people who like the current arrows I
>>         think we could
>>         >>> make this a preference. Is this reasonable?
>>         >>>
>>         >>>
>>         >>
>>         >
>>
> 
>