Monday, July 27, 2009

BBEdit "invisibles" characters

Thinking about building a font for BBEdit, and wondering what characters it uses to represent invisible characters, like spaces and tabs?

Of course you're not.

Unless you got here via a google-search, in which case you might be. Here's what the BB-folks came back with:
  • Carriage returns: 0x00AC (172), unicode name "NOT SIGN" (¬)
  • Nonprinting characters: 0x00BF (191), unicode name "INVERTED QUESTION MARK" (¿)
  • Non-breaking spaces: 0x2022 (8226), unicode name "BULLET" (•)
  • Tabs: 0x2206 (8710), unicode name "INCREMENT" (∆)
  • Spaces: 0x25CA (9674), unicode name "LOZENGE" (◊)
Hope that helps somebody out there.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

So serendipitous that you would post this today of all days...

I had never before used BBEdit but downloaded a trial today. I normally like to edit with visible tabs and newlines. Upon opening my text with BBEdit, I discovered that I don't like the characters it uses.

So, I went google searching and... found this post! That you posted today. Weird!

author said...

That is an odd coincidence. I almost didn't post it this morning, but thought since it'd be quick I'd just do it.

Probably doesn't help much in your case, though -- I don't think you can change which characters it uses (unless you know how to build fonts). The reason I went looking for this was because I'm hoping that the guy who made the Inconsolata font will add those characters, since the ones the OS chooses are the wrong width. Otherwise it's a fantastic font.

Anyway, I guess the world has enough people to make coincidences like this not so uncommon.

Glad to help!

Does anyone read this thing?

views since Feb. 9, 2008