Re: New Transformations in Yelp

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 17:51, Shaun McCance wrote:

> > 3. If my understanding is correct, the arrow in menu choices 
> > (File->New) is now a single Unicode symbol rather than combination of
> > symbols - and >. This looks better but may cause problems if the user
> > has no fonts with this symbol. Or is it included in some standrad fonts,
> > such as Bitstream Vera?
> 
> The particular arrow I used is U+2794, the Heavy Wide-Headed Rightwards
> Arrow.  On my system, this is provided by MiscFixed, which is something
> I should probably avoid.  There are about a dozen right-pointing arrows
> defined in Unicode.  Bitstream Vera doesn't seem to provide any.  A few
> of them are provided by Courier.
> 
> In general, I'm rather tired of kludgy ASCII-formatting.  I really don't
> want to use -> as an arrow.

Agreed. But do we really want to use an arrow that on a standard Linux
system is only present in a bitmap font, so it will look markedly
different from text around it, especially if the user has chosen a large
font size (think of people with vision problems) - and this is assuming
that gtkhtml is smart enough to find a font containing this arrow? Maybe
a better option would be to use a simpler arrow such as   U+2192, aka
→  - the usual (thin) right arrow. It is contained in standard
Symbol fonts - both bitmap X11 one and  Type1 (URW) fonts. I couldn't
find any arrows in URW Courier. Granted, bold arrow looks nicer - if we
had a scalable font with it.

Another option is, of course, to use | instead of an arrow. But I'd
rather keep the arrow. 

Sasha