I don't see much "discussion" there.  Please attach screenshot of OS X or any other terminal showing the desired effect, as well as what you get in gnome-terminal.

Hello Behdad, sorry for the answering delay.
I was wrong with the OS X terminal display, the behavior is like the Gnome-Terminal one, but it doesn't mean it shouldn't be changed in Gnome-terminal! ;)

With a modern game interpreter running with sdl display, you can get this kind of thing:
http://ifiction.free.fr/images/gargoyle_allroads.png

This display is very good indeed, but we may like to use another interpreter, which could be run within gnome-terminal.
The same game looks like this in gnome-terminal, using the fontin font:
http://ifiction.free.fr/fichiers/fizmo_gnometerminal_ugly.png

(it looks OK with "monospace" or "courrier" font, but those fonts are just less attractive than "fontin" or any other proportionnal and artistic fonts)

If you wish to try this yourself, here are the links to the game file I used in those pictures (though any Inform/Infocom game would get a similar appearance):

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/inform/AllRoads/AllRoads.z5

and the terminal interpreter can be compiled on any unix box:

http://frotz.sourceforge.net/

The sdl interpreter with the nice output, even though studying it wouldn't help gnome-terminal at all because it's a different system:
http://code.google.com/p/garglk/


Adding proportional fonts in gnome-terminal wouldn't only benefit interactive fiction games, it could also please people using gnome-terminal for reading or writing literature.

vte is a terminal widget, implementing certain standards and specifications.  It's not a general-purpose console.  You can easily (well, not as easily as simply using vte) write one yourself using either pango layouts directly or using GtkTextView.  See Reinteract for example.

behdad

*** Bug 669952 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Re: the end of comment two, proportional fonts are nice for editing code! See the screenshots at http://JonathansCorner.com/terminal/

From my duplicate description which describes a reference implementation of a proportional font in a terminal:

The problem of making a proportional font terminal that uses proportional fonts
when a user would want proportional fonts and still lines up ls and ASCII art
is considered to be AI-hard. Making a terminal that JUST uses a proportional
font (and maybe lets the user switch between proportional and fixed-width) is
not AI-hard.

I have a hacked fork of Ajaxterm that works by forcing a proportional font on
Ajaxterm's PRE block; Ajaxterm no longer works with Firefox and I believe it
has never worked on Chrome, but if you're doing cross-browser testing and have
IE6/7/8 working, or for instance if you have Firefox 2, you can use the
terminal at http://jonathanscorner.com/terminal/

I invite you to read what is said about typography and terminals at
http://jonathanscorner.com/terminal/. The Unix terminal is the last major
holdout I'm aware of in the computer world where usability-optimized
proportional fonts are not available (and if you insist on using Verdana, the
terminal gives every character the width of the widest character, nerfing the
proportional aspect of the font).

When my terminal was only working with IE, I found myself for the first and
only time using IE as my primary browser--the terminal was valuable enough to
serve as a killer app for using IE.

I don't use it now because the implementation has latency of something like a
second for a keystroke, and that gets painful quickly. However, I do offer
http://jonathanscorner.com/terminal/ as a reference implementation of something
I think gnome-terminal can do better, by far.

Thanks,
Jonathan