Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org,  sb@dod.no,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2020 16:57:32 +0200
> 
> > All of this is already available, although not all of it is exposed to
> > Lisp.  Taking advantage of existing pixel-level capabilities is part
> > of the job of providing the features that Richard has in mind.
> When you say all of this, and not exposed to lisp, what exactly do you
> mean? :-) Is it possible to get a pixel offset from a point with elisp?
> Height, width, or whatever that could be used to calculate if current
> buffer region fits iin a page or not?

See window-text-pixel-size as one example of what we have.  The
underlying functionality is even more powerful.

> >> It would be nice if Emacs could draw a thin line to denote edges, or a
> >> rectangle of page size below the text as word processors do
> >
> > We already can display such thin lines, see, for example, help-fns.el
> > (search for ":height").  No X-level graphics is needed.
> As composed of characters or as overlays with underline/overstruck or
> similar?

Just look at the code, it is self-explanatory, IMO.

> What about a rectangle in some color as a background to symbolize a
> page.

You will see in the code I pointed to that we actually already produce
a rectangle, just a very thin one.