Re: an experiment with proportional-width fonts

Jonathan Harris writes: > Maybe I'm Missing The Point but Charles' approach seems wrongheaded to > me. Why, thank you for the compliment! That's the nicest thing anybody's said to me all day! ;-) > If I understand correctly Charles' approach is to work out at > redisplay time which characters in a buffer need to be aligned with > which other characters so that tabular data is displayed correctly. This > is tricky and likely to be expensive. Maybe it's a little tricky but my current one-pass implementation is not expensive at all. And, you can always turn it off. If I put in the backtracking that Martin suggests, then it will get a lot more expensive. But, as Martin also points out, "computers are fast". I've got cycles to burn... hell, I've even toyed with the idea of antialiasing... > But isn't this exactly the problem that tabs are meant to solve? The > package list example looks so bad with a proportional font because > spaces are used instead of tabs. There's no reason that tabs couldn't be > used instead. How about the calendar example? Hmm, I guess you could set a tab-width of 3 and use tabs instead of spaces. But I think it would be a huge amount of work to change all the packages to use tabs instead of spaces. The problem is widespread; it affects GNUS and VM and dired and efs and pcl-cvs and ... Suppose I change all these packages to use tabstops instead of spaces for alignment. Having done so, I would have a nice-looking package list and nice-looking calendar, but when I go to edit some arbitrary file that uses spaces for indentation I don't get aligned text. Or, if I'm viewing man pages. Or using W3 to view some <pre> text that's supposed to be aligned. And how about when I'm in my *shell* buffer and type "ls" ? Taking care of the alignment inside of redisplay is a *universal* solution, rather than changing 10,000 individual .el files. > And frankly I don't think that the "int i; double d" > problem is worth solving. I'm on the fence about this one. I may not think it's quite as important as Martin does, but it *would* be nice. I don't like the idea of introducing backtracking, though. > No-one else tries to solve the `mmmm' problem (actually I think that > 'W's are usually considered the widest letter?). So you would call it the `WWW' problem? (Sorry, couldn't resist). > In word processors the user sets tab stops in inches and it's up to > the user to make sure that the tab stops are wide enough to > accommodate the data. I don't see why we should try to do more. I thought XEmacs was all about "doing more" !