Re: no good way to highlight rectangle while region is highlighted

[Joe Wells <jbw@macs.hw.ac.uk>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     I think highlighting both the rectangle and the region will be easiest
>     by drawing colored lines around the rectangle and keeping the current
>     way of highlighting the region.  I have already tried this (using the
>     ?box? feature with colored lines), and I find it the easiest to
>     visually understand of the ways that I have gotten to work.  I'm not
>     using it now because every time the rectangle changes, areas of text
>     get shifted on the screen right or left by 1 pixel and this is
>     visually jarring.
>
> Are you saying that, with the new face feature you asked for,
> the rectangle outline would work perfectly?

As I mentioned, I have tried the simultaneous highlighting of the
region and the rectangle, using background color for the region (the
default behavior), and the “box” face feature for the rectangle.  The
only problem with this (as far as I can tell from my experience) is
that the “box” face feature uses horizontal space (and so the text
gets shifted back and forth as the rectangle changes).  If this
shifting of the text didn't happen, I think this method of
highlighting the rectangle would be quite nice.

I can't claim it would be perfect.  If the vertical lines don't take
extra horizontal space, then obviously for some text the lines will
overlap a bit with the glyphs being displayed.  (This problem can
already happen for overlap with the horizontal lines, but that is less
of an issue because in the most commonly used fonts very few glyphs
use pixels in the top and bottom lines of the space they are
allocated.)

> If someone wants to implement it, I have nothing against it.

Always the main issue.

-- 
Joe