bug#4084: 23.1; boxquote uses ugly ASCII "drawing" characters rather than Unicode

bug#4084: 23.1; boxquote uses ugly ASCII "drawing" characters rather than Unicode

[Roger Leigh]

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The standard boxquote looks like this:

,----[ title ]
| Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi et
| dolor vitae quam fringilla vulputate ac id sapien. Nullam auctor
| consequat magna in fringilla. Praesent sed dolor vel felis
| condimentum faucibus eget in risus. Phasellus dignissim vehicula
| purus, non tempus arcu rutrum vel.
`----

However, since Emacs now has perfectly good Unicode support, the
following shows boxquote configured to use standard Unicode line drawing
characters with rounded corners:

(set-variable 'boxquote-bottom-corner "╰")   ; U+2570
(set-variable 'boxquote-side "│ ")           ; U+2572 + space
(set-variable 'boxquote-top-and-tail "────") ; U+2500 (×4)
(set-variable 'boxquote-top-corner "╭")      ; U+256F

╭────[ title ]
│ Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi et
│ dolor vitae quam fringilla vulputate ac id sapien. Nullam auctor
│ consequat magna in fringilla. Praesent sed dolor vel felis
│ condimentum faucibus eget in risus. Phasellus dignissim vehicula
│ purus, non tempus arcu rutrum vel.
╰────

Much nicer!  It would be great if these could be made the default in
place of the ugly ASCII.


Regards,
Roger


In GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2009-08-03 on nautilus, modified by Debian
Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.10603000
configured using `configure  '--build=x86_64-linux-gnu' '--host=x86_64-linux-gnu' '--prefix=/usr' '--sharedstatedir=/var/lib' '--libexecdir=/usr/lib' '--localstatedir=/var/lib' '--infodir=/usr/share/info' '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--with-pop=yes' '--enable-locallisppath=/etc/emacs23:/etc/emacs:/usr/local/share/emacs/23.1/site-lisp:/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/23.1/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/23.1/leim' '--with-x=yes' '--with-x-toolkit=athena' '--with-toolkit-scroll-bars' 'build_alias=x86_64-linux-gnu' 'host_alias=x86_64-linux-gnu' 'CFLAGS=-DDEBIAN -g -O2' 'LDFLAGS=-g' 'CPPFLAGS=''

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: en_GB.UTF-8
  value of $XMODIFIERS: nil
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
 : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux             http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
 `. `'   Printing on GNU/Linux?       http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
   `-    GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848   Please GPG sign your mail.

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bug#4084: 23.1; boxquote uses ugly ASCII "drawing" characters rather than Unicode

[Teemu Likonen]

On 2009-08-08 11:18 (+0100), Roger Leigh wrote:
> The standard boxquote looks like this:

Boxquote is not part of the standard Emacs. I guess you need to contact
the author of boxquote.el or someone who distributes your version of
Emacs.

bug#4084: 23.1; boxquote uses ugly ASCII "drawing" characters rather than Unicode

[Drew Adams]

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> Much nicer!  It would be great if these could be made the default in
> place of the ugly ASCII.

Sure doesn't look nicer to me! See attachment.

Boxquote should not use Unicode characters unless the buffer is already Unicode
encoded. Even then, I'm not convinced the Unicode version looks better.

[-- Attachment #2: throw-boxquote.png --]
[-- Type: image/png, Size: 22166 bytes --]

bug#4084: 23.1; boxquote uses ugly ASCII "drawing" characters rather than Unicode

['Roger Leigh']

On Sat, Aug 08, 2009 at 08:24:29AM -0700, Drew Adams wrote:
> > Much nicer!  It would be great if these could be made the default in
> > place of the ugly ASCII.
> 
> Sure doesn't look nicer to me! See attachment.
> 
> Boxquote should not use Unicode characters unless the buffer is already Unicode
> encoded. Even then, I'm not convinced the Unicode version looks better.

I think your font is to blame here; perhaps it's using a fallback as
the corners, and as a result they don't line up correctly.  Even so,
IMO this looks (subjectively) better than ASCII.  I agree that
using Unicode characters in a non-Unicode buffer would be wrong;
boxquote should use a fallback in that case (can Emacs do
transliteration for non-representable characters when you insert
characters not represented in the buffer encoding)?

Anyhow, I'll pass this along to the author, since it's not part of
Emacs itself.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
 : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux             http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
 `. `'   Printing on GNU/Linux?       http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
   `-    GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848   Please GPG sign your mail.