[watch the cross post]
While in Milan I came up with the idea of a font designed for hacking and
displaying Perl code.
Just raised it on the london perl mongers irc channel. At some point we
should start up a list to discuss this further, but for now I'll collate
comments and ideas.
Anyway, here's the (short) discussion:
<veeg> has anyone thought of designing a perl font?
<acme> hey, good idea
<veeg> ppl are always complaining that perl looks ugly, because of the %'s
and @'s, but surely that's just because of the font
<acme> you mean so that all perl stuff looks consistent right?
<veeg> well there's that, and also making it easier on the eye
<veeg> just taking helvetica or something and making the %$@ characters
cleaner would be a start
<veeg> maybe i should ask the list
<steve_> veeg thats quite a good idea .. I believe you can display fonts
with metafont?
<davorg> it needs to be a fixed width font
<veeg> davorg: good point
<veeg> google for metafont
<veeg> dipsy, google for metafont
<dipsy> veeg: Google says metafont is
http://www.landfield.com/faqs/fonts-faq/metafont-list/ or
http://www.landfield.com/ftp/faqs/fonts-faq/metafont-list or
http://homepages.tu-darmstadt.de/~st002556/texfonts/liste.html
<dipsy> okay, veeg.
<dipsy> veeg: Google says metafont is
http://www.landfield.com/faqs/fonts-faq/metafont-list/ or
http://www.landfield.com/ftp/faqs/fonts-faq/metafont-list or
http://homepages.tu-darmstadt.de/~st002556/texfonts/liste.html
<acme> i was thinking the way the apple font is garamond condensed - we
could have a Perl font, increasing our brand yadayadayada
<veeg> steve_: what's metafont? :)
<veeg> acme: and if we could make perl look nicer to the untrained eye, it
would also improve our brand
<acme> so how would you make @ and % nicer then?
<veeg> @ could be a simple, loose spiral
<acme> debian logo / dreamcast like?
<veeg> I guess
<steve_> http://www.gnu.org/graphics/hurd_mf.html
<veeg> steve_: ta
--- steve_ is now known as itz_steve
<veeg> itz_steve: ah, looks good
<veeg> acme: we'd obviously need to come up with several contenders and
vote upon it
<itz_steve> looks quite time consuming as well
<veeg> come up with characters, and let people implement them in their
favourite fonts
<veeg> and endorse a particular font if we find a lot of agreement
<veeg> can someone easily set up a mailing list for this?
<davorg> can't you use penderel for the mailing list?
<veeg> davorg: I don't know, I've been out of the country
--- You have new mail (24 messages, 195366 bytes total).
* veeg shows davorg his swamped mailbox :)
<davorg> :)
<acme> is penderel up and installed with everything then?
<veeg> well I'll raise it on the london.pm list then, and get more ideas
<davorg> don't think penderel has any mailing list software on it yet
