Re: Tick Reduction

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: stefankangas@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org,  dgutov@yandex.ru
> Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2021 10:56:41 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> The x-height is literally the height of the lower-case x character.  😀
> >> But it's used as a shorthand to say something about the characteristics
> >> of a font -- the x-height is what matters most for legibility, and the
> >> ascenders (in characters like "b") and descenders (in characters like
> >> "g") are separate things.
> >
> > We can easily get the info from the font.  But how do you propose to
> > use that info?
> 
> I'm not quite sure.  But picking a variable-pitch font that has the same
> x-height as the monospace font we've picked might be nice.  Of course,
> that has its drawbacks -- we don't want the total height to be taller,
> either.
>
> But perhaps it can go into the mix when searching for an appropriate
> font -- if we have several candidates with the correct total height,
> preferring the one(s) with the same x-height would be nice, I think?

You want to know this when selecting fonts?  That'd be expensive,
since it requires to open a font,l an expensive operation.  Currently
we avoid opening fonts we consider as candidates, and only open the
one we select.

And of course, no one guarantees we can even find a font with the same
"x-height" as the monospaced font we are using.  It might not exist on
the system.