Using proportional fonts in Gnus

Using proportional fonts in Gnus

[Paul Moore]

I have searched the archives for any information on this, but there
seems to be very little around (and what I found is pretty out of
date, so it's entirely possible that things have moved on...)

I am sick and tired of using fixed-width fonts for my newsreading.
Specifically, the range of fixed width fonts available to me on
Windows is minimal, and Courier New is the best of a bad lot (I know,
pathetic isn't it?)

What I'd like to do is to switch to a proportional font. This works
fine for the article window (I need to do some Emacs magic to make
the default face different in the article buffer(s) only, but that's
OK...) but I'd like to do the same for the summary and group windows.

The problem with the summary/group windows is that they condense a
lot of information into a small space, and Courier New is not a good
font for doing this. But if I switch to a proportional font, then
using spaces to put things in columns doesn't work.

Is there any way of maintaining a column-based display while still
using a proportional font?

Paul.
-- 
It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By
definition, there are already enough people to do that. -- G. H. Hardy

Re: Using proportional fonts in Gnus

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Paul Moore <pf_moore@yahoo.co.uk> writes:

> Is there any way of maintaining a column-based display while still
> using a proportional font?

Nope.  Emacs' support for proportional fonts is still pretty
immature. 

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: Using proportional fonts in Gnus

[Miles Bader]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> Nope.  Emacs' support for proportional fonts is still pretty
> immature. 

It's interesting to consider how one might do this in an "Emacsy"
manner convenient for elisp programmers.

For instance a "super tab" text property saying "align to colum N (or
leave M units of whitespace if already there)"; maybe some degree of
indirection would be useful so one need not rewrite the buffer text to
change N dynamically.

Given that emacs already has text properties to allow munging spaces,
perhaps this would even not be terribly difficult to implement (you'd
just leave the decision as to how wide the resulting space was until a
point where the display engine had an idea of concrete display
positions).

-Miles
-- 
"Suppose He doesn't give a shit?  Suppose there is a God but He
just doesn't give a shit?"  [George Carlin]

Re: Using proportional fonts in Gnus

[Giacomo Boffi]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
>> Nope.  Emacs' support for proportional fonts is still pretty
>> immature. 
>
> It's interesting to consider how one might do this in an "Emacsy"
> manner convenient for elisp programmers.

it seems to me that an ancient, experimental, discontinued XEmacs
branch had some support for proportional fonts in "formatted" buffers,
the like of dired or mail/news summaries

if you're interested in this topic, i think you should try asking on
the xemacs-beta mailing list, where more knowledgeable people could
help you

ciao
                                                                gb
-- 
Come si fa a discutere della bontà di un editor del genere se non si
parla di quanto pulito faccia il codice?           -- Zefram,  in ING

Re: Using proportional fonts in Gnus

[Miles Bader]

Giacomo Boffi <giacomo.boffi@polimi.it> writes:
>> It's interesting to consider how one might do this in an "Emacsy"
>> manner convenient for elisp programmers.
>
> it seems to me that an ancient, experimental, discontinued XEmacs
> branch had some support for proportional fonts in "formatted" buffers,
> the like of dired or mail/news summaries

My personal branch of Emacs has this feature too.  E.g., I have
proportional fonts turned on by default in Gnus *Article* buffers, and
even in this message composition buffer (and I can toggle it in a buffer
with `C-c C-v').

Because of disagreement about random implementation details with RMS,
this isn't in the CVS trunk, but it's a reasonably simple patch (it's a
C-level change though, not lisp-level).

[I assume that the details will be worked out in the future, and such a
feature included in a future version of Emacs, but I find it too
exhausting to argue (with RMS) about, especially with a release pending,
so I'm not pushing right now.]

-Miles
-- 
Next to fried food, the South has suffered most from oratory.
  			-- Walter Hines Page