John,
One of the reasons I dislike box drawing characters is the large
number of hours I spent tweaking them for the book "Computer
Architecture Concepts and Evolution" by Gerrit Blaauw and Frederick
Brooks. The book was crafted by David Lines, a graduate student of
Fred's using TeX and a font that provided them.
Actually, Fred wanted non-italic characters, so they substituted in
Courier glyphs that ended up in the book. The endless arguments over
italic, slanted (and the slant angle) and especially the adaption of
lowercase italic "American Typewriter Light" (the font the original
APL type element borrowed from) were almost as tedious as the line
drawing stuff.
The changes from the IPSA SAX font that I did for Fred Brooks were
minor and involved trying to get the boxes to join smoothly in the
sizes being used in the book - an endless pursuit... (but then, you
did say "those irritating box characters") However, I'm curious, what
was missing from the SAX font? It originally had a complete set. Did
Bob move them around or did some go missing?
In the original font, the box characters were below space (this was
done because codepoints above 127 were consumed by APL and "underbar"
alphabetic characters making 11 contiguous positions unavailable).
The SAX font glyphs started in codepoint 15 with the IPSA logo,
followed by 11 box drawing characters in an order that is perhaps
different than the DOS order, then TM, CircleC, CircleR, open star,
and codepoint 31 was my initials (JKT) in a logo... Some of these
were in the nature of watermarks.
In addition to the APL fonts, I have one that was put together for J
(the early years) using Courier Roman for alphabetics and special
characters (@#$% etc.). In that font, the box characters are
immediately above 128 and the rest of the upper half of font is blank.
One interesting variation on all this was the font used in the IBM
Systems Journal, APL 25th Anniversary Edition. Italics were vetoed
and the slant angle was reduced (I argued against changing from 14
degrees to 7 degrees, but gave in since IBM was paying me in lieu of
giving me credit in the colophon - an amusing thing in itself...)
Later, the feedback was that the font really should have been more
slanted... Perhaps the most curious thing about that font is that it
is the only PostScript font that I have ever encountered that was in
EBCDIC (not ASCII) order... I talked to the printing company about it
and they said they didn't argue with IBM - and just please provide it
that way and they would deal with it....
One of the suggestions in this thread was to use ISO characters, and
for some things that is OK. But IMHO, APL rendered in such a font
always reminds me of a ransom note...
I have various versions of these fonts if they are of any interest/use to you.
- joey
At 12:09 -0700 2008/06/04, John Baker wrote:
I want to typeset the J graphic box characters in LaTeX2e - particularly the
pdftek MikTeK version - using the \usepackage{lstlistings}
package.
For this to work I need a typewriter family virtual TeX font that combines
Ghostscript Adobe Courier with the box
characters found in something like TrueType Lucida Console (Type 1 would be
easier). The resulting virtual font has
to be properly defined and mapped for LaTeX2e. I've poked around J and CTAN
and the only thing I've come up with is
Bob Berneky's adaption of a Type 1 APL sax font which doesn't have a
complete set of box characters.
I'm enough of a TeXnician to do this but if I someone else has a good
solution LaTeX2e typesetting of box characters please chime in.
John Baker
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