[emacs-humanities] Optical Size Adjustment of Variable Fonts in Emacs

[Oliver Taylor]

Most variable width fonts are optically smaller (meaning they look smaller) 
than their monospace counterparts at the same point size, even those that are 
designed to be used together.

The relationship between the default, variable- and fixed-width faces is 
somewhat complex and doesn’t easily allow you to optically correct your font 
sizes in a way that works with both text-scale-adjust and in documents with 
mixed pitches.

So I’ve created a little minor mode that fixes this problem.

And I’ve written a post[1] describing the problem and how I found the solution, 
but before I publish it on my website I wanted to get opinions from this list.

I could, of course, simply post the minor mode and explain what it does, but I 
wanted to write a bit of a story that describes how I found the problem, the 
various approaches I took, and the solution I created.

Any suggestions for the write-up or the code are welcome.

And, would anyone be interested in helping me create a package from this? I 
feel like this is a common problem in need of a solution, and I haven’t seen 
other packages that deal with this.

I’ve never created a package before and I’m sure my code could do with a great 
deal of improvement/standardization.

[1] 
https://github.com/olivertaylor/olivertaylor.github.io/blob/master/notes/20210324_emacs-optical-font-adjustment.org

Please note that the images only really display the problem when displayed at 
the correct resolution, and github’s css enlarges them to the width of the 
window, so you may need to use a small window to see the problem.