Re: Tick Reduction

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> I believe the reason why we get the visual impression that the monospace
> font is larger than the proportional, even though they take up as many
> vertical pixels, is because it takes up more horizontal space.

Yes, that does seem like the explanation here.

> Such visual illusions are not entirely uncommon in typography, and the
> normal solution is to forget about aligning things "mathematically" or
> with a ruler.  (Doing that would be counter-productive when the key
> thing is what it looks like to a human reader and not to a machine.)
> Instead, you simply eye-ball it.  There's no way around it.
>
> So my conclusion is that Emacs does things "right" here, in the sense
> that it doesn't do any adjustments: it just presents the font at the
> specified font size.

Yup.

> Does harfbuzz, or something else, provide us with a way to know the
> x-height of a character?

I've poked around briefly, and I don't see anything likely.  fc-query
doesn't say anything about x-height either.  Anybody else know?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no