Re: (re)display problems after font backend merge

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

Stephen Berman wrote:
> 
> The (active) mode line face now displays Helvetica correctly.  Note,
> however, that in the inactive mode line face the characters are wider,

And not anti-aliased?  Was this still with FontBackend: xft ?

And [welcome to complication, Level 2] did you have fontconfig/xft set
to allow bitmap fonts or not?  While most linux distros now default to
"no", if fontconfig/xft /is/ using bitmap fonts, then "new" font
handling can still, depending of course on the font, result in
x-core-font-like-in-appearance rendering, you see! (including in emacs
with FontBackend: xft, as far as I can tell. Hmmm.)

At least if you're on debian  or a debian-oid (e.g. ubuntu...), this is
usually controlled by which one of
/etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf or
/etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf
is symlinked in to /etc/fonts/conf.d/
(if you change this, you may have to run fc-cache -fv )

I recommend "no".  Unless you really have a need of particular glyphs
from or just can't live without some old favorite (probably monospace)
bitmap font I guess.

If you do enable bitmaps in fontconfig, try
"fc-list :scalable=False family" in a shell to get the fontconfig names
for bitmap fonts usable in fontconfig/xft apps...