> I don't think you have sympathy towards users for whom monospaced fonts do not work for their language, I do, that's one of the reasons I'm trying to handle

> I don't think you have sympathy towards users for whom monospaced fonts do not work for their language, I do, that's one of the reasons I'm trying to handle Unicode and proportional fonts in the first place. Given the circumstances, it is indeed preferable to do so, but given that it's basically encoding of approximated sounds (well, potentially information in general) on a 2D plane, it is a rather complicated (both code-wise and computations-wise) way to achieve such a task. > Rendering speed hasn't mattered since years ago. Browsers can render megabytes of pure text (hours of reading material) in seconds. Chrome only started using "complex path" for English texts a few years ago, employing mentioned word cache. Rendering megabytes of text in seconds is indeed achievable (especially if the words are cached, and it's not megabytes of integer sequences), but still complicates the rendering, and still slower than to open and navigate through the same megabytes of text in, say, less or vim, or even links -g. It's not an issue if you don't have to do it (or to use a program where it wasn't optimized well), but if you do, it is. Edit: added a reply to the second part.