Re: Bold by moving pixels problem

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 01:09:10PM +0000, Robert J. Chassell wrote:
> Did you install the patch in which bold is created by duplicating a
> glyph, but moving over a pixel?

Yes

> The change does not look too bad with the plain vanilla instance,
> however, there are three problems with the consequences of the change
> for instances of emacs started with my .emacs file:
> 
>   * the new bold creation technique fills in letters such as `m' so
>     that they become unreadable rectangles

Yes, that happens with the font I use too; however, as I said in my original
post, it actually doesn't seem to make much difference to readability.

[I'm not entirely sure _why_ it doesn't make a diffence -- I suppose that the
little blob is close enough to an `m' and there's enough context that my
brain can fill in the details.  It also helps I suppose that boldface
typically only occurs in short stretches of text, not whole buffers.  In any
case, I simply don't notice it at all, unless I explicitly look to see.]

> That is to say, when I reset the value of `mode-line-buffer-identification'
> so its face is :weight normal rather than :weight bold, that change is only
> temporary.
...
>   * I do not know how to set the value that is associated with 
>         (face (:weight bold) ...
>     in my .emacs.

As far as I know, there is no way to universally tweak face attributes.

If the only thing that concerns you is the `synthesized bold,' I suppose a
variable could be added to specifically inhibit this behavior.

However, some `real' bold fonts actually have this same problem --
characters like `m' can be only vague blobs, with the vertical strokes
undifferentiated.  Perhaps in such a case, people would like to disable
even `real' bold-face.

So maybe it would be better to add a more general feature that could also
make such a decision based on the actual font rather than universally.
[Another case might be fonts that don't have italic -- some people
might like to e.g. display an underline instead in this case]

I'm not sure how such feature should look though.

> The `m' in the word `emacs' becomes unreadable.

You might think about just trying it for a while, and seeing if you stop
noticing...

Thanks,

-Miles
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