Re: Personal gift - INR 10,000 (Ten Thousand) - to new contributors

[Stefan <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> What I would like to see is a feature to enhance Emacs's ability
>> to display formatted documents.  For instance, making indentation
>> work in terms of fractions of characters, so we can display properly
>> aligned tables with variable-with fonts.
> Isn't this already possible with ':align-to' display specs?  See the
> nodes "Specified Space" and "Pixel Specification" in the ELisp manual.

Yes, "indentation in terms of fractions of characters" is possible
with :align-to, but that doesn't really help displaying tables with
variable-width fonts.  I mean, it helps, but not enough to get
a reliable result.

I know of immediate 2 problems when doing such an aligned table:
- can't do right-alignment because the indentation needed depends on the
  pixel width of the variable-width text.
- can't reliably truncate elements because, again, we don't know their
  pixel width, so if we use "char-width" instead (the best we have so
  far) we sometimes truncate too early and sometimes too late.
Both of those problems affect existing Emacs packages.  We could
probably solve both problems by adding a new display spec which would
specify a width to use for the covered text, along with whether to align
it on the left or the right (and maybe which glyph to use the indicate
truncation when truncation is needed).


        Stefan