Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> 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.

The "L" wouldn't be monospacified here -- only the digits.  And in the
vast majority of fonts, the digits are the width we're aiming for, at
least as far as I can see, so it will visually be no change.

(Monospeciation of the numbers is basically not necessary unless you
have a very odd font -- virtually all proportional fonts do not have
proportional widths for the digits.)

> 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.

First line without monospacification, second line with: