Ideographic space in monospaced fonts

I am using iosevka as a mono font.

Many of my games require padding with spaces to match the size of double-width glyps. I've been using two spaces because it has worked with my terminal fonts and iosevka.

A user complained that the grid did not line up in their browser, so I tried an 'ideographic space' codepoint instead of the two spaces, thinking it may be more correct.

But it was narrower than two spaces in iosevka.

Do you have an opinion on this?

Sep 25 · 3 months ago

3 Comments ↓

My recommendation is that if you want something that is sure to work everywhere, don't use any double-wide characters. Different terminals, fonts, and renderers will have minor or major differences when it comes to showing such characters.

In Lagrange, there may be a bug related to spaces in preformatted blocks, especially when mixing glyphs from multiple fonts and/or color escapes. I've seen some suspicious cases...

I'm not sure exactly which Unicode characters you are using here, but my first thought was, and that's why I suggested it, finding a Unicode "empty circle" of the same "set".

In my mind, this would look like a "connect four" grid, and would be not too distracting, and easy for the player to tune out. I'll try to look for an example and comment it for you to evaluate, if you want.

But, as I said, this is mostly a "me" problem, so don't waste too much effort. If I find something, I'll suggest it, and if not, it's perfectly playable as it is too.

I personally find the grid distractingly busy when it's always full.

I've considered forcing a dark background (then I can make a circle invisible) but people have different tastes...