On 10/17/05, Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
I'm surprised Windows doesn't convert "file" into "file" just to be difficult.
Mac Keynote apparently does this. It looked exceedingly odd to me when this happened in monospaced text that represented code -- having a variable called $filename seemed most inappropriate. I thought this had happened by mistake, and I mentioned it to the presenter; he showed me that this was done automatically and on-the-fly: moving after the fi and deleting backwards one character turned it into $flename automatically rather than deleting the entire fi "ligature" (which was apparently merely on-screen and not in the underlying storage). Apparently, similar software is also used to typeset some books and magazines; not only does it mess up with people who align things with spaces (since "file" is one character-width shorter than "pile" in the cases I've seen involving monospace characters), but if you interpret it literally, you'll get code that doesn't even compile since it uses non-ASCII characters in identifiers. (Unless you have software that does allow this, which was already hated on further up.) I mean, first we had typesetting software automatically turning two consecutive hyphens into en or em dashes, which looks weird in command-line invocations such as "foo --help"; that seems to be on the decline now. I'm not sure whether this automatic-ligaturing in code is better or worse, though. -- Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
