Bug#856033: ITP: brailleimg -- produce text images and graphs abusing Braille glyphs
On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 08:05:32PM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Adam Borowski, on sam. 25 févr. 2017 18:24:33 +0100, wrote:
> > Alas, it won't work: I see that, while alignment of the graph itself works
> > well, anything but terminals (which force a char-cell grid) fails to give
> > Braille and ASCII characters the same width, despite requesting fixed-width
> > display.
>
> That's not normal: fixed-width fonts should really have fixed-width for
> the characters used by gnuplot.
"Should have" and "have" are different things. :(
> > You can see how bad it is on https://angband.pl/doc/alluni.txt -- you should
> > get an aligned grid with right edge of every full block forming an even
> > vertical line, yet most blocks fail to align even within themselves.
>
> That's expected: some characters have double-width, others have
> zero-width.
My test sheet accounts for that: it includes only wcwidth()==1 and 2
characters (recently updated for unstable's glibc). You can see that most
lines include 64 characters, CJK ones have 32, a few lines are mixed.
> But for characters that have single-width, they are really
> aligned with a proper fixed-width font.
Depends on your software. xterm, libvte, pterm, rxvt-unicode get it right,
mousepad, firefox, chromium and Microsoft Edge don't. They prefer
appearance over accuracy, and when borrowing a glyph from another font, they
use the other font's horizontal advance which breaks the fixed width rule.
> > gnuplot relies on being able to place labels within the image, which works
> > for ASCII and maybe Latin/Greek/Cyrillic but, except for most terminals, not
> > for anything else.
>
> Then gnuplot is missing taking into account the value returned by
> wcwidth() (0, 1, 2, ...), that's the bug.
I don't know whether gnuplot is doing it correctly, I haven't tested -- but
even if it does, the output will be misrendered by browsers.
This is not restricted to Braille tricks, same happens if your label
includes letters that happen to not be in the recipient's chosen font, and
you can't control the latter.
Thus, the only safe way to use Braille for drawing is to not mix it with any
other character range at all -- or at most, place labels exclusively to the
right of a rectangular graph. Even labels at the bottom turned out to be
badly shifted.
Meow!
--
Autotools hint: to do a zx-spectrum build on a pdp11 host, type:
./configure --host=zx-spectrum --build=pdp11
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