Comment by xelxebar

> Number of monospaced font character blocks this string will take up on the screen

Even this has to deal with the halfwidth/fullwidth split in CJK. Even worse, Devanagari has complex rendering rules that actually depend on font choices. AFAIU, the only globally meaningful category here is rendered bounding box, which is obviously font-dependent.

But I agree with the general sentiment. What we really about how much space these text blobs take up, whether that be in a DB, in memory, or on the screen.