Re: Fill column indicator functionality

[Óscar Fuentes]

Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden> writes:

> On 15/03/2019 10.07, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
>> What I'm missing?
>
> I this I see what caused the confusion.  There are two answers:
>
> - First, at least one of the examples I mentioned involves changes in
> line height, not in character width; that's the part I worry most
> about.

Yes, I've seen this quite often: Emacs chooses a font for some unicode
char and the line height is altered.

> - Second, I believe the 80-character limits is usually intended to
> serve as a bound on the width of the text on display (the assumption
> being that short lines are easier to read than long ones, and that
> keeping a limited width makes it easier to show multiple text
> fragments side by side). When the text is monospace, it's natural to
> express the limit in terms of a number of characters. When the text is
> displayed in a variable-pitch font, the natural equivalent is to
> express the limit in pixels or em units. IOW, a long lines indicator
> still makes sense even for variable-pitch fonts; you just don't want
> it to count characters.

This is more about typesetting than anything else. As long as Emacs has
no real WYSIWYG word-processing capabilities, IMHO the lack of this
feature on that context is not important.