(Feature request) Toggle for monospaced (or grid based) character spacing

[pjcdores]

As the title says, I'd like to be able to toggle monospaced (or grid based) character spacing on or off, so that all separators can be displayed with the same character width as numbers and letters, which I believe would make it possible to guarantee vertical alignment of characters across different lines.

(I'm using a monospaced font, and the characters : and - are displayed with different spacing)

Possible issues that come to mind:

• Not working properly with separately sized seconds digits
  • Possible workaround: Only allow it if separately sized seconds digits are disabled?
• Not working at all with non monospaced fonts
  • Seems pretty likely. Is it possible to detect whether a font is monospaced or not? Because if it is, then that would allow for automatically disabling the option with non monospaced fonts.

Thank you for your attention and for the development of DigitalClock.

[Kolcha]

hello, thanks for contacting me. I'm aware of many issues related to text rendering, but issues related to monospaced fonts are strange. monospaced fonts should work nice as you expect. this is definitely something to look into. can you provide more details: - what is the OS you are using? - what is the font you are using? - is this font available in the OS or some custom font? - if it is custom font, can you provide the link where to get it? I see some possible problems that may lead to the situation you see: - font may provide incorrect character metrics. this happens surprisingly often, but most of the software somehow deal with it. I'm using just "raw values" "as is", so side effects are possible. - Qt (the framework I'm using) has some rendering issues. it is known that Qt had a lot of text rendering issues in the past (around 2019-2020) and have nowadays on Windows, especially with fractional scaling (it still doesn't work properly). switching Qt font rendering engine on Windows to the Linux one may solve many issues, but introduce other. there is always some tradeoffs. - maybe I need to do some more complex font rendering by myself. what I have right now is very minimal, it implements the very basic font rendering features. what you suggested (implement character grid) is very problematic to implement as text rendering done in a very tricky way, it is not rendered "character by character" in most case, it rendered by groups of characters. but character by character rendering still can be enforced. you can notice this quirks by applying gradient to the numbers. in any case, this is something to look into. thanks for reporting. Sent from Sony mobile

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On Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 13:46 Pedro Dores ***@***.***> wrote: *pjcdores* created an issue (Kolcha/DigitalClock5#67) <#67> As the title says, I'd like to be able to toggle monospaced (or grid based) character spacing on or off, so that all separators can be displayed with the same character width as numbers and letters, which I believe would make it possible to guarantee vertical alignment of characters across different lines. (I'm using a monospaced font, and the characters : and - are displayed with different spacing) Possible issues that come to mind: - Not working properly with separately sized seconds digits - Possible workaround: Only allow it if separately sized seconds digits are disabled? - Not working at all with non monospaced fonts - Seems pretty likely. Is it possible to detect whether a font is monospaced or not? Because if it is, then that would allow for automatically disabling the option with non monospaced fonts. Thank you for your attention and for the development of DigitalClock. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#67>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAHHLP3FHR4HDIEEWFRZXVD4H5YKTAVCNFSM6AAAAACSMY2N5GVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43ASLTON2WKOZTHAZTQMJRHA2DMOA> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[pjcdores]

I'm on windows 11, the font is Hack (third party font not included in windows) and the address for it is https://github.com/source-foundry/Hack Thank you for the quick reply, I'll need to check those per character rendering options. Edit: Just tested with Courier New (pre-included in every Windows version in some form), and the problem persists: <img src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c79d738e-de1a-4fb5-a84b-9f2f4846dc1d"/>

[Kolcha]

ok, I investigated what is going here and now have a good understanding what causes the issue.

first of all, I would like to note that this font reports perfect metrics, this is very rare case (at least based on my experience), so it is very good for debugging purposes (btw, in my linux system this font is the default monospaced font, hence used anywhere where monospaced font request and no custom one provided, including browser).

so, the source of the problem is architectural flaw... time is rendered as parts according to format (for example for "hh:mm": "hours", "separator(:)", "minutes"). for each part rendering (e.g. hours) font metrics are considered/used when calculating character positions, but in-between these parts (i.e. after hours and before separator), the info from font metrics is ignored. so, separator is just rendered next to the part regardless of font info.

because how it is implemented, there is no easy way just to fix this flaw, but I'm planning great refactoring in any way, so the issue will be addressed there. nothing should be noticeable for the users, it will be "pure internal" invisible change, even it will be huge.

thanks for noticing and reporting it!