Re: an experiment with proportional-width fonts

mb> Hmmm. XEmacs would have to VERY smart to do this right. <== mb> like ignore those two spaces at the beginning of this mb> non-sentence. Getting columnation right in all cases is simply not possible. Without real AI, anyway. Simply take any example, duplicate it, and insert the semantic equivalent of "Here is what a sample text looks like properly columnated with proportional fonts:" before one of the segments and "Here is how terrible a sample text looks with proportional fonts but without columnation:" before the other. You simply won't be able to handle all such texts with regexps! I think 100% is simply unnecessary. Everything that is true of proportional fonts is true of code colorization, and we should treat it the same way as we do font-lock. It may be a little harder to implement for proportional fonts. Eg, it absolutely must involve arbitrary[1] amounts of backtracking since `mmmm' for most fonts will be much wider than `iiii', yet there is no guarantee that the former will occur before the latter in a columnated list, or how far apart they will be, a non-backtracking implementation is hosed. Nor can you even use a heuristic like "space is always intermediate in width between `i' and `m'." But probably font-lock will take you some ways in creating a framework for a "column-lock" package that can be flexibly configured to columnate various kinds of text acceptably well. Anyway, well-chosen screen shots will surely excite much envy from those trying to implement "word processors" on top of an Emacs editor. ;-) Footnotes: [1] Well, you could restrict the amount of backtracking to a window- full if you're willing to have columns bouncing back and forth on every scroll. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."