On 13/09/2019 14:36, Victor Zverovich wrote:
>> Instead of inventing something in the abstract, a good next step would
>> be to figure out how (in UTF-8 mode) Apple Terminal, Gnome Terminal,
>> Konsole, and the new Windows Terminal determine how many terminal
>> display column a string takes. (I'm not volunteering.)
>
> I'm volunteering to do this since improving handling of width is already
> on my TODO list for the fmt library.

I'll be interested in what you come up with on this, as I don't think
this solvable.

For example, imagine formatting into a file, and then that file is
rendered onto a console.

Another example: imagine formatting into a clipboard, which on Windows
and POSIX might involve three or four renditions into differing formats
and encodings. Then the consumer of the clipboard chooses an unknown one
of those renditions, and reinterprets it in some unknown way into a
paste into some document.

Personally speaking, I think the best course is to declare codepoint or
byte based formatting widths, and draw a line under it.

Niall