[Edu-sig] IDLE fonts

[kirby urner]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 3:29 PM, David MacQuigg
<macquigg at ece.arizona.edu> wrote:

> I have tried a few of the dozens of fonts in IDLE, but found none better than the default Fixedsys.  This must be the one they optimized for IDLE.  In other tools, like TextPad, I prefer Courier New, but it is surprisingly BAD in IDLE!  I guess there really is no standard line weight, or whatever, for "Courier New".  It all depends on how it is tweaked for a particular program.
>

Then there's the whole discussion of fonts, what's TrueType (ttf), can
you use those in Linux, how to install, what's different on Mac and so
forth.  Programmers concerned with fonts in end user documents, such
as when synthesizing PDFs on the fly with ReportLab, need to know
which fonts do or don't support which Unicode codepoints.  Python is
legitimately invested here, so depending on the type of programming
course, we might justify the time.

> As for offering students dozens of fonts, I say too many fonts are at best a distraction, at worst a source of ambiguity as to what symbol is actually intended.  Find a font that will clearly distinguish the characters O0l1Z2S5, and stick with it.  We are teaching programming, not website design.  Fixed width is the most readable, and essential for tables and indented code, but a compact (proportional-spaced) font like Arial, can add 50% more text on a page.  The gain for code is much less, because most lines are shorter than the page width.
>

I'm finding it easier to bring a new TrueType font into IDLE on
Windows than on Ubuntu, despite having added a softlink from a
subdirectory returned by xset -q into
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-misc, where I've got my font.  Wing-101
and OpenOffice are having no trouble finding it.  I'll keep noodling.
Getting more font savvy is an important step when coding mostly
outside of Latin-1, a favorite way to get into Python in some schools
and/or math labs.

Kirby