Scrolling in buffers with inline images / point outside viewport

[Klaus-Dieter Bauer <bauer.klaus.dieter@gmail.com>]

Hello!

TL;DR: Is it possible to have point outside the visible portion of the
buffer?

Scrolling in buffers with inline images can be awfully jerky: Images
invalidate the linear relation between lines and height on the screen to
the point where scrolling the mouse down once may skip several screens. As
my org-mode files often contain a series of output plots, this makes them
very hard to navigate with the mouse wheel and inconvenient to navigate
with the keyboard.

It can partly be solved, as demonstrated in [1], by doing smart positioning
of point. However, I can't think of a solution how to scroll when there are
images that are larger than the buffer height if after every scroll
operation point must be visible. The solution from [1] for instances gets
stuck at large images, unless one scrolls continously in which case
presumable Emacs do a redisplay during the scrolling, that would force the
viewport into a position that makes point visible.

Is there some way to get emacs allow an "out-of-viewport" point as usual in
modern GUI programs? This would allow to implement smoother scrolling with
images and allow the modern behaviour, where I can put the cursor to a
position, scroll down a couple of pages with the mouse wheel and
shift-click to select the region in between.

kind regards, Klaus

PS: Reducing the size of images with `org-image-actual-width' would be a
work-around but won't work in Windows, where the binaries come without
ImageMagick support (by which I mean being linked to use the IM library,
not calling imagemagick binaries -- that misunderstanding came up before).

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[1] http://www.randomsample.de/dru5/node/25