Bold characters not standard width

When viewing bold characters output from TinyMUSH 3 (in fixedsys 9) the bold characters are being displayed as wider then the normal character font, throwing off the formatting of everything on that line.

Depending on the font bold characters may well be wider.

You can fix this by going into World Configuration -> Appearance -> Output and uncheck "Show bold".

Well, that's not the solution I had in mind. I've seen bold handled correctly in Fixedsys 9, and bold is used quite often in many MUSHes.

Also, someone I spoke to have a version prior to 3.1 and said that he did not have the bold width problem--leading me to believe it was a bug.

OK, there are two sorts of bold here:

• Bold font (typeface)
• Bold colour

Many MUDs (and MUSHes) use bold to effectively get another set of 8 colours (there are 8 'normal' ANSI colours and 8 'bold' ones). So by mixing bold and normal you effectively get a choice of 16 colours.

MUSHclient supports this, and even with 'show bold' unchecked you will still get the other 8 colours.

However the bold typeface is something that is a bit problematic, because in FixedSys it *is* wider. Just to prove the point, I have taken a paragraph from a SMAUG area and pasted it into WordPad, selected FixedSys font, 9 point, and then bolded one paragraph but not the other.

You can clearly see that the bold paragraph is wider, which is exactly what happens in MUSHclient, and has in all previous versions. Now the extra width can:

• Be annoying
• Throw out fixed-width spacing

This is why MUSHclient offers you the choice to not 'show bold'.