Re: Display certain glyphs with paddings on the side

["Clément Pit-Claudel" <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>]

On 2019-12-02 11:24, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>
>> Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2019 14:51:29 -0500
>>
>> Aligning ACSII characters with Chinese characters in Emacs has been a pain for me. The common solution (among Chinese community) is to scale Chinese characters with `face-font-rescale-alist’ and make one Chinese character precisely twice as wide as a ASCII character. However, that makes the Chinese characters taller than the ASCII characters. 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.

This is the approach that I've been using in a different context.  I use programming languages with heavy reliane on mathematical symbols, so I have patched versions of mathematical fonts to ensure that symbols line up nicely with monospace characters.  The python code that does these transformations is here: https://github.com/cpitclaudel/monospacifier

I think Emacs might have most of the features needed already as part of the composition engine, but applying the right composition properties to each character would be costly and complicated.

Clément.