Re: Variable-width font indentation

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 22:36:55 -0500
> 
> * I'm not aware of a way to get a specified space whose width equals that of 
> a particular string, without measuring the string beforehand.  Is there a way?

What do you mean by "measuring the string"?  Calculating its width?

In your implementation you used 'length', which is definitely not TRT,
especially with variable-width fonts.  I think you can find something
to help you out in shr.el.  One other possibility is to use
font-get-glyphs, but I'm not sure it will help in this case.

And I still think that for programming modes, what we need is to
substitute tab-width and column by suitably computed number of pixels,
perhaps derived from the width of some character.  Other than that,
the indentation code should "just work", as long as it uses :align-to
to get to a given pixel coordinate.