iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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ræn @raen.nekoweb.org · 06/08/2026

i have a new archenemy and its name is ⎯

a breakdown of how the character is positioned in a line of text and how it actually renders. each character has a width (which scales based off of the font size (height)) that is used to tell the computer how it should be positioned relative to the prior character and how the next character should be positioned relative to it. this width is fully independent from what it actually ends up drawing. a well-known example of characters that intentionally draw outside of their 'box' are some diacritics, which are used to modify the preceding character.
this dash that i need to use happens to draw itself offset slightly to the right of what one might expect, so there's a gap to the left of where it starts on the screen and it extends into the character to the right. since it's still drawn at the internal width of the character, it can be used in succession to draw a continuous line, but you can't position it flush to anything. which is annoying. because that is what i need it to do.

my current solution is to throw "<span style="letter-spacing:-9px">⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯</span>" at the start of the line im trying to draw but it looks kinda bad zoomed out so im going to have to mess around with other stuff

110

ræn @raen.nekoweb.org · 12/08/2026

my solution ended up being to transform: scaleY(.7) a different dash that behaves in a way that you'd actually expect it to but i also dont like that because i had to eyeball it. but i dislike it less so its what im using

000