From about 1993-1995, and later on occasion (when I posted from
shell accounts), my Usenet .signature file contained the original
"Indent-o-Meter". I invented it. I like to think of it as an early
harbinger of today's world of Web forms and Javascript
monstrosities. It was interactive, sort of.
When posted, the Indent-o-Meter looked like this:
Matt 01234567 <-- Indent-o-Meter
McIrvin ^ Harnessing tab damage for peaceful ends!
but if somebody quoted the article in a
followup and indented the Indent-o-Meter a couple of columns with
"> ", it would look like
> Matt 01234567 <-- Indent-o-Meter
> McIrvin ^ Harnessing tab damage for peaceful ends!
because I had placed tabs strategically so
that the numbers (and the blurb on the right) would stay put, but
not the caret. Things preceded by tabs stay in the same absolute
position when the line is indented (unless text to the left crowds
it out, in which case it jumps to the next tab stop). Things
preceded by spaces, on the other hand, move to the right. So I
could make the relative position of the numbers and the caret
change when the text was indented. Here, the Indent-o-Meter is
indicating that it has been indented two columns. (In these
samples, I'm simulating the tabs with spaces, in case your Web
browser has different tab stops than mine.)
I was inspired by the phenomenon of "tab damage" in pictures
made of ASCII characters. If a picture used tab characters for
white space, then indenting the picture in quoted text would mangle
it, because the picture would no longer have the same position
relative to the tab stops. The Indent-o-Meter was the world's
first, and, as far as I know, only application of tab damage to
accomplish a purpose, albeit a silly one.
Exactly how to arrange the tabs, I leave as an exercise
for the reader. (If you want to cheat, there are Indent-o-Meters on
some of my old alt.religion.kibology
posts, but only a couple of them have the tabs intact.) I
assumed that the tab stops were every eight characters. This was
the default setting on DEC terminals, and was very common in the
olden days. Of course, this meant that the Indent-o-Meter was only
accurate modulo eight. I (usually) had the tabs placed very
carefully so that the Indent-o-Meter would at least look OK when
indentation ran over the eight-column limit; the numbers and the
blurb at the right would jump right eight columns, and the caret
would end up back under the zero.
Other versions of the Indent-o-Meter, used at various times:
Matt 01234567 <-- The amazing Indent-o-Meter (modulo 8)
McIrvin ^ Harnessing tab damage for humanity!
Matt 01234567 <-- Indent-o-Meter
McIrvin ^ (modulo 8)
Matt 01234567 <-- Indent-o-Meter (mod 8)
McIrvin ^ The Hula Hoop of the 1990s!
Matt 01234567 <-- The original Indent-o-Meter
McIrvin ^ Someday, tab damage will light our homes!
Matt 01234567 <-- Indent-o-Meter
McIrvin ^ Indentation will soon be too cheap to meter!
Matt 01234567 <-- Indent-o-Meter
McIrvin ^ Tab damage as window on reality!
The blurb was usually something conveying boundless futuristic
optimism about the power of tab damage to enrich our lives. There
was also one about making the deserts bloom, but I can't find it
anywhere.
The Indent-o-Meter was a small fad around 1993 and 1994. Other
people put it in their .sig files. Ingenious people thought up
variants, such as the digital Indent-o-Meter. That had a list of
digits built out of ASCII symbols, and tabs arranged so as to
mangle all of the digits into unreadability, except for the one
indicating the indentation level! (The entity known as "Jay Paul
Chawla" posted an early version of the digital Indent-o-Meter, but
I don't know who actually invented it.)
Once, I was trying to distribute PostScript illustrations to the
co-author of a particle physics paper we were writing, and to my
adviser. (The illustrations were of "Feynman diagrams", those
things that look like Tinkertoys and represent particle
interactions.) PostScript code is almost plain text, so I
was trying to do this by pasting the code into ordinary e-mail
messages. The Macintosh mail software I was using had that wretched
32k limit for text in a message, so I couldn't just paste the
PostScript into a text message there. I could attach it in various
ways, but my colleagues were having trouble dealing with the
attachments, so I decided, finally, to upload the file to my Unix
shell account and paste it into a mail message sent from there.
The resulting messages, however, could not be interpreted by
their various PostScript interpreters and printers, and for the
longest time we could not figure out what was going on. Finally my
co-author realized that my shell e-mail messages were getting the
Indent-o-Meter .signature appended to them. This was a week out of
my life.
Indent-o-Meters appeared from time to time years after I stopped
using mine. If you want to use one, go right ahead. I don't use it
any more because
- My current news software isn't designed to make it easy to put
tabs in .signatures.
- Many people today use different tab settings or even
proportional fonts, so that the Indent-o-Meter doesn't look
right.
- Many newsreaders now replace tabs with spaces in quoted text.
This makes sense, because tab damage is usually a bad thing, but
tab damage is the lifeblood of the Indent-o-Meter.
I suspect that the Indent-o-Meter now only works for a minority
of Usenet readers. Even years ago, I had to explain it repeatedly
to people for whom it didn't work. Now, technology is gradually
eradicating tab damage. ASCII graphics aren't even all that common
(except for those horrible smileys, which are immune to tab
damage). The Indent-o-Meter is beginning to have the flavor of
those old novelty songs about misbehaving Model T Fords: the
referent of the joke is disappearing, and Usenet is beset with
other, bigger scourges.
For a while I used another ASCII device in my .signature, the
Font-o-Meter, which was simpler in principle. Here it is in two
different fonts (if your browser allows the trick I'm about to
do):
Your font is: Proportional Monospaced
^
The amazing Font-o-Meter! http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/
Your font is: Proportional Monospaced
^
The amazing Font-o-Meter! http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/
For users who don't see any difference between the above, that's
OK, I can explain: The caret appears under the word "Monospaced" if
the font is monospaced, and under the word "Proportional" if the
font is proportionally spaced. It works because proportional fonts
tend to have a much narrower space character. If your software lets
you, you can see the difference by changing the font used to
display preformatted text to a proportional font. (Be sure to
change it back when you're done.) When people do use ASCII graphics
these days, it's usually this effect that causes trouble, rather
than tab damage.
(The Font-o-Meter doesn't work for all proportional
fonts, unfortunately-- in one of his PDF Usenet retrospectives,
James "Kibo" Parry "tested it to destruction"-- but it's hard to
make it more robust without also making it uglier.)
Recently the Indent-o-Meter became immortalized
in the Jargon File. A possible reason is its role in the
etymology of the Troll-O-Meter,
which was made up by Jeremy Reimer in 1994 in a joke on
alt.religion.kibology, probably referring implicitly to the
Indent-o-Meter. The Troll-O-Meter seems to have passed into general
usage among writers on the net to a much greater degree, perhaps
partly because it appeared in the Jargon File much earlier (in an
entry comparing it to the decades-old notion of a "bogometer",
which was probably part of the inspiration for the Indent-o-Meter,
and I had better stop before this causal pretzel gets any more
confusing).
