When monospace fonts aren't: The Unicode character width nightmare

Re:When monospace fonts aren't: The Unicode character width ... by userbinator on Friday September 11, 2015 @10:57PM (#10207070)

I often use ASCII art in comments to add explanatory detail. That would become nearly impossible to do correctly with a proportional font.

Another thing is easily formatting tabular-looking data (e.g. array initialisers) reasonably well. Proportional fonts mean this can't be done, and existing formatted data looks like a mess. Moving the cursor vertically with a proportional font also causes it to distractingly jump left and right instead of in a straight line.

Has anyone who prefers proportional fonts considered whether they'd like proportional vertical spacing (i.e. the height of each line varies depending on what characters are in it)? That would be the other extreme of variable spacing.

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Re:When monospace fonts aren't: The Unicode character width ... by nitrogen on Saturday September 12, 2015 @03:37AM (#10207554)

If one were completely sold on the idea of proportional fonts for coding, it would make sense to go to fixed tabstops (like a word processor or typewriter) rather than fixed-width tab characters, so tabs could always be used to align tabular data.

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Re:When monospace fonts aren't: The Unicode character width ... by ygra on Saturday September 12, 2015 @04:23AM (#10207595)

You could have comments in monospace and the rest of the code proportional. As long as you don't start ASCII art in normal code ...

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