On Sunday 16 Nov 2003 1:22 am, Erwin Rol wrote:
> 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 :-)
It would be really difficult to do this. And it would have to be coded
differently for each OS that Ethereal runs on. To do it only where it's
needed would be harder still. Even just in those places it would look weird.
IMHO, it's a lot of code just to make Ethereal look strange and generate FAQs
about why.
YMMV, if so go ahead and code it and send the list some screen-dumps to show
how good it looks.
--
Richard Urwin