Just as I said, the code has to look good in one font, not N. When I read a paper written by someone else, the first thing I don't do is casually change its font. We invent so many unreasonable reqs to justify the continued used of archaic type writes fonts, sad.
I'm sorry, I'm really trying to understand your point but I really see nothing unreasonable in wanting to view someone's code displayed with my preferred font without changing the structure of said code.
I'm a bit confused by some of the replies - you're talking about proportional fonts for a text editor to view fonts. Using a monospace font makes this easy; using a proportional font makes this very hard.
How would an editor know what to align? It's not part of syntax highlighting - unless you define your own rules.
The fact that this is not available in Vim nor emacs (I haven't checked; maybe it is) would show that it really is a rare want.
a) use proportional font in my editor
b) be able to align things horizontally
c) ensure that this alignment is preserved when someone opens my code with another editor or another font
Presently it's impossible to get all three, so I'm going with b) and c). seanmcdirmid seems to want only a) and b), but without c).
As for solution, sean himself pasted something interesting:
I wasn't aware of that, but it seems interesting, but I didn't look into that much yet. Also, while it seems to cover half of c) (with different font) it will be probably editor dependent (EDIT: but then again, every other solution would be too).
d) let me use any editor; e.g. emacs, vim, or notepad
None of these editors know alignment outside of primitive spacing and tabbing, so therefore archaic monospace fonts win by default; QED.
I'm claiming that not all of these requirements are necessary. We can ensure alignment if the font is fixed for code, or we could ensure alignment in the editor. Neither of these are crazy relaxations.
