[Oberon] counting chars when using a proportional font

[Charles Angelich]

>From: muller at inf.ethz.ch
>Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 19:04:05 +0200
>To: oberon at inf.ethz.ch
>Cc: muller at inf.ethz.ch
>Subject: Re: [Oberon] ETH N-O Native/Beta directory display
>Reply-To: oberon at inf.ethz.ch
>
>Charles Angelich <cangelich at famvid.com> wrote:
>> 640x480 video display driver:
>> System track = 36 Oberon10.Scn.Fnt chars
>> User track   = 63 Oberon10.Scn.Fnt chars
>
>Since Oberon10 is a proportional font it makes no sense to
>count the number of characters.  Or did you mean Courier10?

It would've "made sense" to have counted these characters 
before defining the "small display" within Oberon code to be 
unable to display the entire menu bar within the system track.

It would've made sense to count these characters before allowing
documentation, tutorials, .Tool files, to all be formatted beyond 
the maximum space(s) available to those using the "small"
display as defined within Oberon source code.

I have found references to smaller displays within existing Oberon
modules the problem is that after coding this no one "counted the
available character space" and ignored the disappearing text off
the right side of the 640x480 screen display.

Columnar alignment of fields is basic to a user interface and you
tell me it makes no sense? I would say ignoring this makes no sense.

The OS is not ONLY about exercising the hardware.  It is also about
communication with the USER.

If using a proportional font as the default for Native Oberon is
the crutch to justify the inability to do clean standard displays
then I would submit that a default proportional font was a mistake.

Options would be:

#1: auto-detect display sizes and word-wrap the display to fit the
viewer being used.
#2: auto-dectect display sizes and incr or decr the font size to
fit the viewer being used.
#3: ignore this and continue development of BlueBottle for Pentium
users at the bleeding edge of technology.



Charles Angelich

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