Re: Screen-text sample-code

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com wrote:

>
>I've been using a monospaced font to represent either 
>code samples or text-terminal dialog.

Good.


>
>I usually find that it wants to be wider than my body-text 
>column, 

Every language I'm aware of has a convention for representing continuation lines. Break your lines of
code at any logically reasonable place within the column width you want to maintain and apply the requisite convention.


unless I use a size that requires a magnifying 
>glass. 
>

Bausch & Lomb makes a nice one for this purpose. It comes in its own gift box and is available in bulk to publishers. Get it imprinted with your company logo and use it as a premium. Look what it did for the Compact OED!

>If it's supposed to represent what the user sees in 
>a dialog, then I prefer not to wrap it arbitrarily.
>But I really hate the look of text that gets wrapped 
>into "long line, short line, long line, short line..."

Nu? Break the lines yourself.

>
>Also, some of the screen stuff is tabular, and it 
>looks like hell -- and reads like it -- if that 
>kind of text is wrapped.

Here are a few approaches for tabular material. Maybe one of them will help:

1. Put the tabular matter in a figure and turn the figure on the page--make a landscape page, in other words.

2. If the tabular matter is numeric, use a narrow version of your text font rather than your monospace font. Numerals are monospace by design, so you can use a condensed font and everything will still line up. Actually, as long as you are setting to tabs, it doesn't really matter whether the tabular material is all numeric or not. The tabs will still align.

3. Manually make the ditches between columns narrower. You are under no obligation to maintain default tab settings that apply in a terminal emulation window.


>
>Now, we add the fact that I've got an otherwise-pleasing 
>page layout that's:
>
>a) 7.5 inches wide, by 9 inches high
>
>b) divided into a side-head area and a main text column.
>
>MOST of my screen-text or sample-code depictions just 
>barely fit the full page-width. 

There is nothing wrong with having figures that occupy the full page width (within the overall margins). You do not have to squeeze them into the width of the text column.

>I don't see a way to 
>gracefully fit them into the restricted width of the 
>body-text column.
>
>Some code samples or dialog snippets are just a line
>or two.
>
>Some code samples are fifteen pages long.

Can you put the long ones in an appendix?


>
>It looks really silly to return from that to a text 
>format where suddenly there's a mostly-white-space 
>column down the left with just the occasional 
>heading or icon.
>
>Suggestions?
>
>At the meetings, I keep suggesting that we just include 
>a nice magnifying glass with our product, but I keep 
>getting shouted down...

Shout back.

Dick


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