[Scilab-Dev] Issue with unicode exponents

[Samuel Gougeon]

Dear Stéphane,

Thank you for your on-going efforts to improve the display of 
polynomials and their exponents.
Although i was aware about the potential issue 
<http://bugzilla.scilab.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4236>, i did not catch it 
before your first commit <https://codereview.scilab.org/21100> was 
recently merged.

Actually, some trial on the master shows what we could expect on 
Windows: Setting exponents in unicode breaks the display of polynomials 
in NW (and NWNI) modes:

--> p = (1-%z).^(0:12)'
  p  =

    1

    1 -z

    1 -2z +z┬▓

    1 -3z +3z┬▓ -z┬│

    1 -4z +6z┬▓ -4z┬│ +zÔü┤

    1 -5z +10z┬▓ -10z┬│ +5zÔü┤ -zÔüÁ

    1 -6z +15z┬▓ -20z┬│ +15zÔü┤ -6zÔüÁ +zÔüÂ

    1 -7z +21z┬▓ -35z┬│ +35zÔü┤ -21zÔüÁ +7zÔü -zÔüÀ

    1 -8z +28z┬▓ -56z┬│ +70zÔü┤ -56zÔüÁ +28zÔü -8zÔüÀ +zÔü©

    1 -9z +36z┬▓ -84z┬│ +126zÔü┤ -126zÔüÁ +84zÔü -36zÔüÀ +9zÔü© -zÔü╣

    1 -10z +45z┬▓ -120z┬│ +210zÔü┤ -252zÔüÁ +210zÔü -120zÔüÀ +45zÔü© 
-10zÔü╣ +z┬╣Ôü░

    1 -11z +55z┬▓ -165z┬│ +330zÔü┤ -462zÔüÁ +462zÔü -330zÔüÀ +165zÔü© 
-55zÔü╣ +11z┬╣Ôü░
   -z┬╣┬╣

    1 -12z +66z┬▓ -220z┬│ +495zÔü┤ -792zÔüÁ +924zÔü -792zÔüÀ +495zÔü© 
-220zÔü╣ +66z┬╣Ôü░
   -12z┬╣┬╣ +z┬╣┬▓

This is a blocking issue. IMHO, the fix proposed by Allan clearly 
improves the situation, but is not completely clean as it is implemented 
in the launching batch file, while calling directly the binary will 
shortcut the patch.

Another issue is about the readability of exponents 1 to 3: they were 
likely the first defined, before other figures, but they are clearly 
smaller than other exponents 0 and 4-9.
Reading them was almost OK for me in the commit message, but on the 
Scilab console, i had to increase the font size from Monospaced 13 to 
Monospaced 15 to get them (almost) readable.
I copied/pasted a polynomial from the console into Scinotes, zoomed 
Scinotes, and got the following screenshot, showing the net difference 
in their sizes: :

Without zooming, the "3" is very close to 8, and only its place before 4 
mainly indicates that it's not 8.
Could the 1-3 exponents be redefined with the same size as the other 
higher figures, under other unicode ids?
To be investigated.

Best regards
Samuel

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