Re: unicode box-drawing characters

[Gavin Smith]

On 30 September 2016 at 17:34, Per Bothner <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> 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).
>
>
> The box-drawing characters is what makes for readable output of arrays
> - which is especially desirable in documentation. They are used by mc and
> work fine with emacs and every terminal emulator I've tried so far

I appreciate that there are cases where someone would want to use the
box-drawing characters. However, I don't think that it would be very
easy to implement support for them. I had a look at the pmboxdraw
package mentioned on the page you linked to and it draws the boxes
using \hrule's and \vrule's. (That method wouldn't allow selection of
the text either.) Even if there was a font with glyphs we could use,
there would be the problem of making sure that the glyphs join up
properly, especially vertically. It would not be resilient to changes
in the vertical line spacing.

One alternative would be to write code in Kawa to output Texinfo code
representing an array and use that in the manual, for example

@example
@multitable xx xx xx
@item 11 @tab 12 @tab 13
@item 21 @tab 22 @tab 23
@end multitable
@end example

Unfortunately, this does not output any grid lines.