Re: Tick Reduction

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: dgutov@yandex.ru,  stefankangas@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2021 18:24:57 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > You want to make a proportional font look like a monospaced one?
> > Wouldn't that basically throw away all the advantages of using a
> > proportional font?  I though we want proportional fonts there because
> > they look nicer and more natural?
> 
> This would only be used for the U:-- bit at the front and for the
> line/column specs.  For the latter, there should be no visual
> difference for virtually all fonts, but for the former, it'll typically
> add some space after the - characters.

Won't a line number like L1234 look worse with this
"monospace-ization" than it looks when displayed "normally"?  AFAIK,
proportional fonts are designed to look well when each glyph is
displayed with its advance width in the font.  Overriding the advance
width in many cases looks like some extra spaces added between
characters, which is annoying, looks like a bug in display, and gets
in the way of reading, IME.

> > You can try this by adding SPC characters with (space :align-to)
> > display specs on them after each character in text that uses a
> > variable-pitch face.
> 
> In the mode line we don't know what to align to.

I only meant that as a means to try and see what will such display
look like, without changing anything in the display code.  Just to see
what we will get before we implement it, and decide whether it's worth
the trouble.