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3-LISP WORKING GUIDE#10: FONT

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Issue #10:A Special Font (and Character Set)

Description:We need a special font for general 3-LISP use. It would be nice if a single font could include not only all of the 3-LISP character set, but also all of the characters used in the standard meta-linguistic descriptions of 3-LISP (‘g’, ‘Y’, etc.). In order to cover bravo, INTERLISP, and printing, we will need ".al", ".strike", and ".???" (whatever the DOVER uses) versions.

Status:No real decisions needed; just needs to be assembled.

Last Edited:September 17, 1982 (Brian Smith)

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Currently, 3-LISP can be used and described using characters selected from the Gacha and Math fonts (except for backquote, which we fake using the TimesRoman grave accent), and described using these plus Hippo (Greek). As a first pass, we should merely assemble the various characters into a single font; at some future point, we should aesthetically improve some of the characters (make a better up-arrow, for example, that is symmetric with the Math down-arrow). Any such future improvement of the aesthetics will retroactively improve the looks of files put together using the font; what is important right away is to get the character conventions set up.

Ultimately we will want a variety of sizes; initially we can restrict ourselves to a 10 point version.

Call the actual 3-LISP character set used inside the language (i.e., the set for which there are 3-LISP charats) the internal character set. It should be restricted to no more than 128 characters, pretty much set up in correspondence with the ASCII colating sequence. Also, the internal character set should be fixed width. The 3l-SPECIAL font, however, will include both internal and external characters, and will therefore be variable-width. The external (meta-linguistic characters) can be put onto otherwise unused control codes. A suggestion:

CodeCharacterDescriptionSourceCodeCharacterDescriptionSource

000A— 100X—
000A— 100X—

Needed external:

Y, F, S, Q, l, (a, b, g, d)
W, T, ←, ←, i, j, G, I, J, L, K, =, A, E, #, U, y, B, N, ,, p, q, X, n, &, V
{single, double, and triple} X { left, right, and both } arrows.
;,
[| and |]

Needed internal:

↑, ↑
<underscore>, <back-quote>, <vertical bar> — these are all in ASCII