Re: [Question] How to change the height of the box for unprintable glyphs?

[Rodrigo Morales <me@rodrigomorales.site>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Side note: IMNSHO, Unifont is a very ugly font, so I don't recommend
> this solution.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm still looking for a font, Unifont is not the last decision. If you know an alternative, please let me know.

This is my use case: I usually use tmux in a terminal emulator. I display the tmux status bar at the top. In order to show the most number of lines in a window, I prefer using extremely small fonts (to me, getting as much lines/information as possible in the window is more important than aesthetics). I feel that extremely small fonts bitmap fonts are easier to read than extremely small OpenType fonts. In Emacs, some characters have different height, they increase the height of the lines where they are shown. These lines with increased height make the tmux status bar not to be visible in the =*terminal*= window. This is not convenient for me because the tmux status bar contains information that I need to always see.

These are the possible alternatives that I have thought:

Alternative 1: Find a bitmap font that defines a glyph for most characters. [[https://unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html][Unifont]] does that. The problem is that Emacs presents [[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2024-05/msg00242.html][this issue]] when using that font. In addition to that, the font has a single size: 16x16. I'm looking for a smaller font. Previously, I had used =5x7.bdf= from the [[https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/font/misc-misc][=misc-misc= font]].

Alternative 2: Find a way to make Emacs force a line height for all lines in a buffer regardless of the fonts that are being used. If I get to do that, I could use =5x7.bdf= in =*terminal*=, and the characters that are not defined by that font would be shown with other fonts. I don't know how to do this but I can investigate.

Alternative 3: If it is not feasible to force a line height for all lines in a buffer, find a way to make Emacs use a single font in a buffer, those characters that are not supported by the font would be shown as empty boxes, these boxes shouldn't increase the line height. Thus, I would be able to use =5x7.bdf= in =*terminal*=. I know that =5x7.bdf= supports a small set of characters, so many characters would be shown as empty boxes. This wouldn't be too much of a problem because I would only use this solution when I work with ASCII characters.

Please let me know your thoughts.