[na-user] CW spaces

[k8cc]

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


--
Submissions:              na-user@contesting.com
Administrative requests:  na-user-REQUEST@contesting.com
WWW:                      http://datom.contesting.com/
Questions:                owner-na-user@contesting.com