Re: Using proportional fonts in Gnus

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> Nope.  Emacs' support for proportional fonts is still pretty
>> immature. 

> It's interesting to consider how one might do this in an "Emacsy"
> manner convenient for elisp programmers.

> For instance a "super tab" text property saying "align to colum N (or
> leave M units of whitespace if already there)"; maybe some degree of
> indirection would be useful so one need not rewrite the buffer text to
> change N dynamically.

I'm not quite sure what the OP's "column based display" really entails, but
a related problem I've bumped into several times already is that
the :align-to display property helps handle left-aligned columns of
proportional-text, but there's no easy way to cut the text at the right
point if it overflows, and there's no easy way to handle right-alignment.

In http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~monnier/elisp/mpc.png you can see in the
songs buffer (bottom right) that the last three song titles were truncated
too soon bu t that the album title OTOH was truncated too late (thus
pushing the Artist name a bit further than expected).  The "Time" is
right-laigned and in this case it worked out all right because digits are
pretty evenly spaced and the "Time" string is overall fairly comparable
(the length of "m" compensates the length of "i") so the "e" of "Time" goes
only a tiny bit further than the actual time entries.


        Stefan