Also - some fonts (usually of the arty type) don't have these characters, or their width has not been matched with the font's period, comma and numerical widths.
I have to admit to being a tad curious what the use case for this is...
But can you have a text drawing wrapper that skips specific characters, measuring their length and restarting after where they would have been? Then you don't need Unicode characters.
David Millington - I wanted right justified text without having to do custom positioning/drawing - where the decimal zero is white space. F.x. here 12 instead of 12.0
9.5 11.6 12 <-- #$2008 and #$2007 13.4
I.e. PunctuationSpace and FigureSpace
I don't want to deal with positioning/rendering since it happens inside a third party component.
+Lars Fosdal having been involved in commercial typography and font design since 1975, I feel very confident in stating the rule you are quoting would only apply to monospaced fonts, where all characters in the font share a common width (although kerning tables may still be employed) meaning there is no guarantee that setting a string, (even using a monospaced font), will necessarily result in a common offset by any given type engine. In short, to ensure alignment, (and good visual output) you must either consider both the character advance and any kerning values employed, else you must use a monospaced font AND set each character individually. Typography is interesting stuff, and my second love, following only my little kitten, and immediately before Led Zeppelin, Delphi, really good c compilers, and perhaps my cats.
Joe C. Hecht Empirically speaking , it works well enough for my purpose, since our app uses a specific font. Most of the commercial quality fonts behaved well. Kittens always comes first.
Lars Fosdal sorry, I could not help myself in providing some great info on character spacing (oh how I love typography). Yes, little kittens do come first (especially my little kitten Lynda). I better put her first by getting back to bed! TGuteNacht[0..6];
See a list of all blank characters: en.wikipedia.org - Whitespace character - Wikipedia
ReplyDeleteAnd another list that compares the blank widths of other characters, including period, comma and digits.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html
Thanks, Leif Uneus. Perfect.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that not all fonts follow the rule that the width of a comma should be equal to the width of a period. Edit: but it is usually close enough.
ReplyDeleteAlso - some fonts (usually of the arty type) don't have these characters, or their width has not been matched with the font's period, comma and numerical widths.
ReplyDeleteLars Fosdal welcome to "high quality" font design (;
ReplyDeleteJeroen Wiert Pluimers I guess it is like in many other sectors: The QA is focused mainly on your own primary uses.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit to being a tad curious what the use case for this is...
ReplyDeleteBut can you have a text drawing wrapper that skips specific characters, measuring their length and restarting after where they would have been? Then you don't need Unicode characters.
David Millington - I wanted right justified text without having to do custom positioning/drawing - where the decimal zero is white space.
ReplyDeleteF.x. here 12 instead of 12.0
9.5
11.6
12 <-- #$2008 and #$2007
13.4
I.e. PunctuationSpace and FigureSpace
I don't want to deal with positioning/rendering since it happens inside a third party component.
+Lars Fosdal having been involved in commercial typography and font design since 1975, I feel very confident in stating the rule you are quoting would only apply to monospaced fonts, where all characters in the font share a common width (although kerning tables may still be employed) meaning there is no guarantee that setting a string, (even using a monospaced font), will necessarily result in a common offset by any given type engine. In short, to ensure alignment, (and good visual output) you must either consider both the character advance and any kerning values employed, else you must use a monospaced font AND set each character individually. Typography is interesting stuff, and my second love, following only my little kitten, and immediately before Led Zeppelin, Delphi, really good c compilers, and perhaps my cats.
ReplyDeleteJoe C. Hecht Empirically speaking , it works well enough for my purpose, since our app uses a specific font. Most of the commercial quality fonts behaved well.
ReplyDeleteKittens always comes first.
Lars Fosdal sorry, I could not help myself in providing some great info on character spacing (oh how I love typography). Yes, little kittens do come first (especially my little kitten Lynda). I better put her first by getting back to bed! TGuteNacht[0..6];
ReplyDeleteLars Fosdal, a while there,i was worried you wanted to jump onto the "scam-email" business...
ReplyDelete