Columns in Terminal Emulators (was: Bidi paragraph direction in terminal emulators)

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Fri, 08 Feb 2019 15:45:15 +0200
Eli Zaretskii via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> > From: Egmont Koblinger <egmont at gmail.com>
> > Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2019 13:30:42 +0100
> > Cc: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com>, 
> > 	unicode Unicode Discussion <unicode at unicode.org>
> > 
> > Hi Eli,
> >   
> > > Not sure why.  There are terminal emulators out there which
> > > support proportional fonts.  
> > 
> > Well, of course, a terminal emulator can load any font, even
> > proportional, but as it places them in the grid, it will look ugly
> > as hell  
> 
> Maybe so, but the original text was this:
> 
>   Emacs and 'M-x term' are the route to take if one only has
>   proportional fonts.
> 
> Which I don't understand, since the terminal emulator in Emacs doesn't
> do anything special about proportional fonts, AFAIK.

As a terminal emulator, it does.  It abandons straight columns to
honour the spacing glyphs' widths.  It neither inappropriately
truncates nor inappropriately overlaps glyphs.  These avoided
treatments don't just make text ugly; they can make it unreadable.

Richard.