Re: OT: HTML mail WAS: Re: Open-Cobol

William M. Klein wrote:
For my own information, what do you think about the (HTML) capability of
mixing proportional and non-proportional fonts?

As with most typesetting questions, there's no simple answer.

Fixed-width fonts are usually better for code - as are for example
fonts which use clearly distinct glyphs for all the characters that
are significant in the source code (so eg numeral 1 does not look like
lowercase letter l). That's a special context, where there are
typesetting constraints that don't apply to normal prose.

The use of proportional fonts (or fonts that are otherwise unsuitable
for setting code) for body text is a much more complicated question.
Few people have training in typesetting or visual design, and most
seem to make poor font choices: witness the widespread use of
unfortunate fonts like Arial, Verdana, and the accursed Comic Sans;
apparently random decisions between serif and sans-serif fonts; and so
forth.

And most software does a lousy job of displaying non-monospace fonts -
even Word, for example, is pretty poor at kerning. That's if it even
finds a suitable font and scales it properly.

For this group (com.lang.cobol), I do find that those posts that are able to use
non-proportional fonts for COBOL source code - especially when discussing
"column sensitive" issues is an advantage. I find it particularly useful (to
me) when "discussion" text is proportional while source code is
non-proportional.

Individual users may find it easier or more pleasant to read body text
set in a proportional font. Given the problems above, and my own
experiences with styled-text email, I'm not interested in looking at
Usenet posters' font experiments.

Obviously, I would also find it useful (NOT in comp.lang.cobol) to be able to
mix alphabets (codesets) when discussing (in English) text in another alphabet
(e.g. Cyrillic) much less text in Kanji - and this doesn't even get into the
left-to-right vs right-to-left issues.

There are provisions in Usenet for using character sets and encodings
other than ASCII. Doing so restricts your audience, of course, but the
mechanisms are there. This doesn't require HTML; and it's a rather
different question than whether Usenet posters should decorate their
messages with color and font changes and the like.

Are there ways to use "mixed fonts" and/or mixed alphabets in non-HTML posts? I
am not aware of them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Usenet itself doesn't impose any restriction on what appears in the
message body, thanks to MIME and content-encodings.

In terms of what the typical Usenet user agent will render, plain text
and HTML are pretty much the only choices. Plain text usually means
ASCII, but you can specify other character encodings, including ones
that support character sets for more than one alphabet / writing
scheme (various Unicode encodings, various ISO encodings, CJK
encodings, etc).

Plain text gives the poster no control over fonts, though.

--
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
.

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