Re: Fixed-pitch and variable-pitch faces

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:

> As far as I know, fontconfig's API FcFontMatch is very
> difficult to use here.  It always returns a font that
> fontconfig thinks best matching with the given pattern.  If
> the family name of the returned font is different from the
> requested one, there's no way to know whether the requested
> family name is remapped (or selected as an alias) by some
> config file or not.
>
> So, Emacs currently uses FcFontList only (except for such
> generic families; monospace, sans-serit, serif).

I see.

What if Emacs always uses FcFontMatch if it's compiled with fontconfig
support?  IIUC, this means that fonts using the x font backend are never
selected, since fontconfig will always try to find a match.  But this
may be acceptable in practice.

The alternative is to keep things as they are now, and deprecate the use
of the `fixed-pitch' and `variable-pitch' faces within Emacs.  Stop
using them in the startup screen.  This is not really optimal, since the
underlying problem is unsolved.  In particular, there would be no way
for an Elisp package to say "use an anti-alised courier font" and have
it work reliably.

WDYT?

> In your case, what is returned by this?
> % fc-list courier

~ $ fc-list courier
~ $ 

This is on Ubuntu 8.04.