bug#71605: 30.0.50; [PATCH] Support variable-width text in 'visual-wrap-prefix-mode'

[Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>]

On 6/19/2024 4:45 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> If both the first line of the paragraph and the rest are aligned on
> that width, they will all line up.  IOW, the idea is to make the text
> of all the lines :align-to to the same column number, like this:
> 
>    * some text
>      some other text
> 
> Then you don't care about the actual pixel width of "* ".

Just so I'm sure I understand this: the idea is that the buffer's 
contents are "* some text some other text" and then we set the :align-to 
property on "some text some other text" so that the result is displayed 
like this?

      +---- Here is the align-to column
      v
   * _some text
   ___some other text

The underscores represent the space added by :align-to. In practice, the 
first line might not have any extra space from :align-to, but the 
pixel-width of "* " could be less than 2 * <canonical character width> 
for variable-pitch fonts.

I think that would work, provided :align-to were fixed so that it could 
handle wrapping again. (And so long as we're ok with there being a bit 
of extra space after the first-line prefix when using some fonts, but I 
don't see why that would be an issue.)