On Sat, 17 May 2008 15:02:36 +0100 David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net> wrote:

> Stephen Berman wrote:
>
>> I have not been setting any X resources, though the distribution I'm
>> using (openSUSE 10.3) does set default X resources for Emacs, though
>> "Emacs.FontBackend: xft" is not among them.  I just put that in
>> ~/.Xresources and started a fresh Emacs, but I don't see any difference:
>> the broken underlining and Gnus Summary buffer problems I documented are
>> still present.
>> 
>
> Just in case: did you add it to the active resource database itself?
> You can see the current contents of your X resource database with
> xrdb -q , and add to it by e.g.
>
> echo "Emacs.FontBackend: xft" | xrdb -merge

Ah, thank you.  It was indeed not in the active resource database.
After adding it the way you suggest and restarting Emacs, I now do see
very clear differences.  The non-ascii characters in the Gnus Summary
buffer appear as they did before the font backend merge.  However, the
underlining is still broken and too close to the bottom of the
characters.  But in addition, now the appearance of variable-pitch face
is peculiar and literally variable depending on the values of certain
face attributes, in ways that are to me unexpected and unpredictable.
The following screen shot shows these observations: