Re: Enclosing text in a box

[Yuri Khan]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 at 21:48, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > > Using 'length' to measure the width of text on display is not
> > > reliable, because there are characters of different width.  It is
> > > better to use 'string-width' or 'string-pixel-width' instead.
> >
> > The next stumbling point is going to be “make-string does the wrong
> > thing when passed 17.237 as the count”, without an explanation as to
> > what the right thing would be. (I don’t know either.)
>
> Why would sane code call make-string with such an argument?

My train of thought was:

* OP uses ‘length’ to measure the text, and ‘make-string’ to build a box.
* You point out that this fails for non-monospace fonts, and suggest
measuring with ‘string-width’ or ‘string-pixel-width’.
* OP tries to measure in pixels, realizes one has to divide by the
width of a box drawing character. The division result turns out
fractional.