Re: Proportional fonts

[William Perry <wmperry@monolith.spry.com>]

Ketil Z. M. writes:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Is anybody using proportional fonts with Gnus?  That is, except me?  I
> really like the look of a message in Times-Roman, with a somewhat long
> line length, but I have a few problems.
> 
> I put 'gnus-article-fill-cited-article into the
> gnus-article-display-hook (I think it is).  This seems to work ok, but I
> have to, I think, set fill-column to some number of characters, which
> means the message will jag a lot on the right side, and with lines with
> lots of caps or m's the line will wrap.  Ugly.  Fix?

  Wait until XEmacs 19.15? :) Seriously, I'm working on adding some new
primitives to the redisplay of XEmacs that will allow you to do pixel-based
filling.  Well, actually it will be any arbitrary measurement - say: I want
3em of right border, or I want 15pi, etc.  Its trivial to convert between
picas/pixels/inches/points/millimiters, etc. if you have the screen
height/width in both millimiters and pixels, which both Emacs and XEmacs
let you do.

> Also, gnus-article-fill-cited-article is not intelligent enough when it
> comes to recognizing tables, lists, and the like.  Some simple rules
> could surely be added to adress this?  Though I assume tables will be
> broken anyway, given the use of spaces - unless, of course, that part of
> the article could be displayed in a fixed font.  Same for signature.
> Possible?
> 
> Last, there's the summary buffer.  Given large differences between with
> of spaces, pluses, minuses, and Es, Os, etc, the indentation of articles
> is close to useless.  Perhaps the best thing would be to use some fixed
> font in this buffer - is that at all possible? 

  It is with XEmacs... use buffer-local faces.  You can set up a face so
that it is '6x13bold' in one buffer, but times-new-roman-12pt in another.
Use something like:

(set-face-font whatever-var-holds-the-face-you-want "6x13" gnus-summary-buffer)
(set-face-font whatever-var-holds-the-face-you-want
    "times-new-roman-whatever-whatever-whatever-*-*-*-*-*" gnus-article-buffer)

(don't you just love X LFDs?)

> I use Xemacs, for the moment, but I'll change to GNU any day for the
> above improvements.  Comments?  Suggestions?

  I'd say the improvements will happen in XEmacs first, since Emacs has a
ways to go to catch up in the redisplay department first before this really
becomes feasible.  Right now it cannot handle different sized fonts very
well _at all_ - it makes all lines the same height as the largest font you
have assigned to a face - fairly suboptimal. :)

-Bill P.