Improve glyph spacing for serif fonts

[AlLiberali]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

I know that this may sound psychopathic to most developers but I'd like to use a font like Times New Roman or Garamond for my console. I use Cmder/ConEmu as well which does render these fonts just fine so please fix this:

Here is Cmder:

[lhecker]

Would text rendering like this already be fine for you:

Or do you specifically want to have proportional text rendering like in Cmder?

[AlLiberali]

That certainly looks more consistent and I'd appreciate it but I kind of expected an advanced terminal such as Windows Terminal to be able to beat Notepad in rendering text.

[lhecker]

but I kind of expected an advanced terminal such as Windows Terminal to be able to beat Notepad in rendering text.

I‘m open to improving our support for proportional fonts, but I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. The first half of your response sounds like improving the spacing would be enough, but the second half (the one after "but") sounds like it isn’t? In what other way would you like us to beat Notepad besides making the spacing more consistent? I don’t mean to be rude, but could you please be more precise in your feature request(s)? Otherwise I‘ll repurpose this feature request as one just asking for us to improve the spacing of proportional fonts, if that’s fine, because from a technical standpoint I don’t think we‘ll support full proportional rendering the way Cmder does it soon, due to the unclarity around cell-wise background coloring.

[AlLiberali]

Well yes; I would like fully proportional rendering. But since that'd be difficult, fixing the spacing would do for now. Thank you in advance.

[j4james]

See also #13389.

[WSLUser]

I do think proper font support for all fonts, not just monospaced should be the goal. We can have all these fancy features with even more desired (like getting sixel support even) but proper font support is one of those basic requirements for a terminal and should be prioritized over any new features and functionality. Getting the rendering correct for these other fonts could be difficult to do but obviously can and has been done by other terminals and so should be elevated over other requests. Being able to choose any font you want and simply work would be appreciated far more than anything else.

[DHowett]

Proper support for proportional fonts in a primarily monospaced ecosystem should not be prioritized over any other requests. That's honestly probably the last thing we should work on. 😄

[DHowett]

After a discussion with the team, we're feeling pretty ready to close this out. I appreciate that some folks want to use proportional fonts, but right now it's not in plan for our engineering team and we don't have the capacity to review a community pull request that adds support for them.

We may make improvements to how they're displayed in the future, but we'll probably never commit to being as competent at it as Word or Notepad or richedit... or even cmder.

FWIW: How does cmder handle midnight commander? o_O

I'd be worried it turns out like this: