At 05:23 AM 1/27/01 +0000, Tyler Stewart wrote:
>Has anyone else noticed that the spacing on CW canned messages has become
>excessively long?
>
>I've found I have to put in half-spaces just to get something close to
>normal intercharacter spacing.
>
>This didnt use to be the case...
Tyler is absolutely correct. Last year we had a request to add half-space
capability in the CW messages. In trying to code this, I did some research
into the definition of a word space and discovered that NA's word space was
in fact a half space. So I decided to and make NA send a true word space
for the ASCII space character, and half of that length for the caret (^)
character.
I realize that this implementation does not meet the original request,
which I surmise was to provide the capability to send a shorter word space
than was NA used to send. However, half of NA's original word space (i.e.,
half of a half word space or a quarter word space) is pretty short and
sounded "run together" to my ear. Also, there is only a certain amount of
"granularity" that is possible without a bunch of very complicated coding,
so I'm not going to entertain requests for "3/8 word space", "5/8" word
space" or some such thing.
Personally, I'm not so sure this whole thing is an improvement. My
experience pretty much echoes Tyler's in that I'm finding I have to
manually change a lot of spaces to half spaces to make it sound the way I
want. However, I think that NA's implementation is technically "correct"
and for many people its a satisfactory solution. This change was
implemented in version 10.45 (December 1999) so it would appear to have
been a pretty subtle thing.
Dave Pruett, K8CC
DATOM Engineering
datom@contesting.com
http://datom.contesting.com
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