Re: enforcing double-width CJK character display

[Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>]

>> within, say, konsole 2.6.4 (from KDE 4.6.5), the character width of
>> double-width CJK characters is forced to be exactly twice the width
>> of the used console font, as expected.  Is there a similar option
>> to emacs?  For example, my main Emacs font is `DejaVu Sans Mono',
>> and the font selected for Japanese is `Sazanami Mincho', and the
>> latter's character width is smaller...
> 
> Does "C-x =" tell you that Emacs counts each Japanese character as 2
> columns?

Yes.

> If it does, then the issue is with selecting a better font, is that
> right?

Essentially yes.  However, the question is what you define as `better'
-- I'm talking about scalable fonts, of course, not about bitmap
fonts.  There are two possibilities:

  1. scale the CJK font so that its (CJK) glyphs are exactly the
     double width of a given mono-width font

  2. pad the CJK font horizontally with space around each CJK
     character

I tend towards solution 2 and I wonder whether Emacs already provides
a means to do that, or maybe this can be handled on the FontConfig
level.


    Werner