bug#19872: 24.4; UTF8 characters of unusual width (Gnus markers)

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> I don't see why would you need to do all that.  First, you already do
> these calculations, to know how many blanks to insert, right?  So you
> already know whether a string is too long, at least in terms of
> characters, right?  And :align-to can work in character units as well
> as in pixels.

Well, the problem here is that some fonts are wider than others.  If
Gnus says "this should be 20 characters wide", then if some of the
glyphs are wider than the normal 20 characters, then things won't line
up any more.

You could reserve more space for these instances, but that would leave
too much white space normally.

> And second, AFAIU you are talking about an additional feature.  The OP
> presented a use case where no string is too long, AFAICT.  So it would
> get you bonus points to handle long strings as well, but that's not
> what this bug report is about: the same problem exists with the
> current "alignment" using whitespace, right?

Gnus truncates the strings if they're too long and inserts spaces if
they're too short.

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