Re: ignoring control characters in character width

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Sep 05, 2023 at 09:16:47PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> I think I understand what you don't understand, actually this is not
> about displaying the characters, which is not really done by texi2any,
> it is about situations where we need to count the width of characters
> in texi2any.  For instance, this is to determine when to put end of
> lines when formatting Info to compare with line width, or to format
> multitable cells, or to determine the length of underlining * for a
> heading string as in 
> 
> Some heading
> ************
> 
> Hope that it is clearer.

It would be wrong to output control characters in Info output.  It doesn't
matter what the program does in this situation as it would mean that
something wrong is happening somewhere else, e.g. malformed input.  Worrying
about what we should do for vertical tabs or form feeds is a waste of time
in my opinion.

So it doesn't matter what width is used for these characters, so we
should do whatever is simplest in this part of the code.  Using 0 for
the width seems as good as any choice.


> Also we need to make this choice without
> knowing precisely how the characters will be displayed.  In general
> the display is done by info readers for Info, but it could also be in a
> pager, a text editor for the diverse possibilities of plain text output.
> 
> -- 
> Pat
> 
>