Re: Using proportional (variable-width) fonts in Emacs23

[Tassilo Horn]

Erin Brinkley <erin_brinkley@yahoo.com> writes:

Hi Erin,

> I'm using Emacs 23 now and LOVE using proportional fonts! (AKA
> variable width fonts.)  It FINALLY makes Emacs look beautiful, makes
> text easy to read.

That's a purely subjective feeling. ;-)

> But I discovered a huge problem: the fill and word wrap commands are
> hard coded to work for monospaced fonts only!

They are not hard-coded to specific fonts.  `fill-paragraph' (M-q) means
"reformat the current paragraph in such a way that all lines are at most
`fill-column' columns long".

What you seem to expect was something like "fill to pixel width".  Of
course, that doesn't make sense with real, physical linebreaks.  But
there's `visual-line-mode', which performs line wrapping only on the
display level, without changing the file.

,----[ (info "(emacs)Visual Line Mode") ]
| Another alternative to ordinary line continuation is to use "word
| wrap".  Here, each long logical line is divided into two or more screen
| lines, like in ordinary line continuation.  However, Emacs attempts to
| wrap the line at word boundaries near the right window edge.  This
| makes the text easier to read, as wrapping does not occur in the middle
| of words.
`----

Bye,
Tassilo