Re: [Evolution] Evo 1.4 Editor Size

["D. D. Brierton" <darren dzr-web com>]

On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 16:26, Denny Schierz wrote:

> yeah, i saw you're mails "Problem with things that are formatted using
> spaces(...)" and checked this one. In short, it's working :-)

Excellent!

> But i don't understand it really. Why are fonts so complicated  ?

Hah! That made me laugh. I don't know how long you've been using Linux
but fonts *used* to be a TOTAL nightmare! Nowadays, with fontconfig and
the fonts:/// view in Nautilus they're actually supposed to be really
easy now! :-)

Still, when it comes to the different types of typefaces, there are only
two things that you really need to know: the difference between serif
and sans-serif, and the difference between proportional and monospace.

     A. Serif vs. sans-serif. Serifs are the little "tails" that you see
        on the ends of the lines which comprise the letter shapes. Serif
        fonts, such as Times Roman, Palatino, Courier, are generally
        regarded to be easier to read at high resolution at "normal"
        sizes, such as in a book. However, at larger sizes, such as
        chapter headings, or on billboards or road-signs, or at lower
        resolutions such as computer screens, sans-serif fonts are
        generally easier to read. Some modern fonts are "semi-sans",
        which means some serifs are used to distinguish very similar
        characters, such as the numeral "1", the capital "I", and the
        lowercase "l", even though most of the other characters lack
        serifs. Microsoft's Verdana is an example.
     B. Proportional vs. monospace. In a monospace font the width of
        every single character is exactly the same. In a proportional
        font the width of each character is proportional to its shape,
        so that a lowercase "i" is much less wide than an uppercase "M".
        For "plain text", i.e. text without formatting such as you get
        in a terminal, or when reading or editing a plain text email
        message, is traditionally set in a monospace font, because
        people use spaces and tabs to format text into columns, and
        ASCII characters such as "+", "-" and "|" to format tables, and
        that only works with a monospace font.

A typeface can be a monospace serif one, like courier, or a monospace
sans-serif one like Vera Sans Mono, or a proportional serif one like
Times, or a proportional sans-serif one like Arial. So, not really that
complicated.

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren dzr-web com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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