Re: Using proportional (variable-width) fonts in Emacs23

[Stefan Monnier]

> Not necessarily.  In Emacs, we can specify that text be displayed
> aligned to a specific width in pixels.  See the node "Specified Space"
> in the ELisp manual.  Perhaps display of programming languages could
> use this feature to align program source even with proportional fonts.

I don't think we have good support for that in the display engine right
now, but we do have some amount of support for it and it's not used for
that purpose, and I think there's a good reason: there is no place to
store the necessary information in the file.  So while you might be able
to do align on-demand and even maintain that alignment as the buffer is
edited, it's difficult to infer the needed alignment from the source
file: I think that the information present in the file is sufficient for
90% of the cases, but the remaining 10% is problematic (and even
getting those 90% working might be dependent on the language, i.e. on
the major-mode).


        Stefan