Re: macos.texi updated

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> I'm not against the introduction of a new font specification style,
>> but I think it is mainly for developers and power-users.  Emacs
>> already has a mechanism that enables users to specify fonts in a
>> simpler way at the face level.

> You're right..  But the population of "power users" in this case for
> whatever reason seems fairly large (just subjective impression), and the
> requirement to learn XLFD (to compose a fontset, or whatever else) and
> partake of the pleasures of asterisk-counting seems onerous.

This has nothing to do with power users.  It's simply that until Emacs-21,
XLFD was the standard way to specify fonts in Emacs, and that until recently
XLFD was the standard way to specify fonts in other X11 apps as well.
That's a lot of historical baggage.  Creating yet another syntax will not
reduce this baggage by one bit.

The fact is that there is a new syntax and people do use it, tho a lot of
people still use the old one.

> In addition, I've been integrating the Cocoa port's font handling with
> xfaces.c, and can say it's onerous for developers.

Yes, this part probably needs to be redesigned for Cocoa/OpenStep/xft/w32,
but it has nothing to do with the user-level interface.  The internal
interface should simply not use a syntax but data structures instead.


        Stefan