* * * * *
                                        
           We're a long way from the halcyon days of ASCII-only text
                                        
> Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To
> my knowledge, literally no system renders text "perfectly". It's all best-
> effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
> 

“Text Rendering Hates You [1]”

I don't know if I'm glad or sad I didn't read this article before rendering
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) into different [2] formats [3]. On the one
hand, it might have completely discouraged me from even starting. On the
other hand, I don't use the full span of Unicode characters in my blog posts
(which I'm very thankful for, after doing all this work). But on the gripping
hand, Lynx [4] was doing a horrible job at formatting HTML into text, and
what I have now is much better looking.

So let's see … we now have three hard things in Computer Science:

  1. cache invalidation;
  2. naming things;
  3. text rendering;
  4. and “off-by-one” errors.

Yup, that seems about right.

[1] https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2020/07/04.1
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2020/07/16.1
[4] http://lynx.browser.org/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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