Re: unicode box-drawing characters

[Per Bothner]

On 10/01/2016 04:29 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On 30 September 2016 at 17:34, Per Bothner <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

There are definitely fonts that include the box-drawing characters.
One Free font that does have them is DejaVu Sans Mono:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts
http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Main_Page
DejaVu is included in at least Fedora and Ubuntu.

Rather than replacing individual characters, it might be
better to (have an option to) replace the font used,
for example for code/tt/example.  I don't know how easy that
is: I found a "GNU Texinfo font subsystem" manual,
but it doesn's appear to describe "standard" texinfo - at least
texinfo complains about: @fontfamily * mono DejaVu
  unknown command `fontfamily'

In comments I read:

@settitle GNU Texinfo font subsystem

@c Originally written by Oleg Katsidatze and Karl Berry, 2006.
@c Public domain.

@ifnottex
@node Top
@top GNU Texinfo font subsystem

Unfinished chapter on GNU Texinfo font subsystem, also unfinished.
@end ifnottex

Oh well ...
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/