Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal GUI

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From: Erwin Rol <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 02:22:13 +0100
On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 02:11, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Erwin Rol"
> Subject: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal GUI
> 
> 
> > What also would be very nice is being able to use proportional fonts but
> > still draw them with a fixed width.
> 
> Uh, No. I seriously doubt that would be a very nice feature.
> 
> It would look really really weird.  Proportional fonts using fixed spacing
> would just very wrong.
> Please do create a mockup to see just how weird and horrible it would look.
> 

Proportional fonts for the normal text parts of the protocol tree make
it easier to read and make it possible to select a font that is used by
all other applications too. But the only two parts of Ethereal where
proportional fonts are a problem are the flags fields, the dots, ones
and zeros have different widths, but they all should align, else it
looks very strange. And the hex dump display, there the groups of two
hex number should also align. And for the ASCII dump part of the hex
view the same. In all those situations we are not talking about normal
"text". Especially the hex view will hardly change since in most
proportional fonts the 0-9 A-F are about the same size. The flag field
are just dots and 1 and 0 there it also will not look weird. And the
ASCII dump is a ASCII dump anyway, that always looks weird :-)    

> 
> God gave us 24x80 and fixed sized fonts for a reason, you know.

To use them on fixed sized VT100 terminals ?  ;-) 

- Erwin

-- 
       Erwin Rol Software Engineering - http://www.erwinrol.com/