Re: Display certain glyphs with paddings on the side

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: casouri@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2019 23:56:22 -0500
> 
>   >> Is it possible to add some padding
>   >> to the sides of a Chinese character and make it twice as wide in
>   >> Emacs?
> 
>   > I don't think we have any such features.  You will have to choose your
>   > fonts such that they provide this nice alignment.
> 
> I don't think it would be terribly hard to implement such a feature,
> as features go.

I'll welcome patches to that effect, of course.

Personally, I don't think I have a clear idea what is the feature we
should implement.  First, how does users tell Emacs they want this to
happen?  Do we introduce some buffer-local variable or a minor mode?

Next, what exactly should the feature do? override the width of each
glyph with an integral multiple of the width of the default face's
font?  If so, what to do when the default face's font is not a
fixed-pitch font?  And should we do the same if the font to be widened
is also larger in height (i.e. we are talking about something like
chapter and section headings in Info)?

IOW, I think we need first to come up with a detailed specification,
so that we have a clear idea of what needs to be implemented.  I
encourage people to file a feature request bug report on debbugs.