Re: [ft] Suggestion/Inquiry: keeping metrics.horiAdvance for emboldened fixed-width fonts

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:53:31 +0100, Raimund Steger wrote:

> The issue that has been brought up -- not for the first time -- is
> that some text editors use bold face for syntax highlighting, and if
> said editors happen to use a font that has no native bold variant
> (Droid Sans Mono, Inconsolata, Lucida Console) the characters will
> not align between the lines as FreeType adds emboldening strength to
> the horizontal advance width which many toolkits use without
> modification (not terminal emulators though! as I've found, but...
> the rest).

But surely, if the font _does_ have a bold style, then that, too, will
have different metrics, and the text won’t line up. So why are these
text editors expecting the text to line up for fonts _without_ a
designed bold style?

If they want to do emboldening without changing the metrics, they
should be doing something like overstriking the glyphs with slight
offsets or equivalent--in other words, apply their own effects to the
text.