Re: unicode box-drawing characters

[Gavin Smith]

On 28 September 2016 at 20:40, Per Bothner <address@hidden> wrote:
> When I use the Unicode box-drawing characters in an example
> (to "pretty-print" multi-dimensional arrays) it works fine
> with DocBook or HTML output, but texi2pdf complains:
>
> l.15404: Unicode char @u8:═ not defined for Texinfo
> l.15404: Unicode char @u8:╗ not defined for Texinfo
> l.15405: Unicode char @u8:║ not defined for Texinfo
> and so on.
>
> Kawa uses the box characters when arrays are "displayed".
> For example: #2a((11 12 13) (21 22 23))
> is displayed as:
> ╔#2a:2:3═╗
> ║11│12│13║
> ╟──┼──┼──╢
> ║21│22│23║
> ╚══╧══╧══╝
> I find this format useful in the Kawa manual to show
> the effect of the various array operations.
>
> I assume this is a font problem, and there is no easy fix.

Yes, you are right. To implement this, we'd need to know which font
contains these characters, and load that font if and only if the
document uses the box-drawing characters. I'd assume the pxboxdraw
package in LaTeX uses such a font.

Alternatively, it would be possible to draw the boxes by using \hrule,
\vrule etc. This would be more difficult, though.

> For me pdf output has relatively low priority (and dvi output
> has zero priority), but it would be nice to have the correct output.
> I could use png images of the output but that is obviously less desirable
> (more hassle with lots of small image files, doesn't scale (zoom) as well,
> takes more space, and text can't be selected).  Using @iftex to use an
> image only in the tex case, but that's even more of a hassle and management
> problem.

I agree.

Another idea is not to use the box-drawing characters for the sample
output (I assume there is some option to Kawa not to use them).