Re: Font slants

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

>>> When I do M-x customize-face RET default RET, the value of the `default'
>>> face is given as a Lisp expression instead of the usual value menus.
>>> This occurs because the slant of the face, as supplied by the new font
>>> engine, is "roman".
>> 
>>> I just committed the following patch to fix this.  However, I'm not sure
>>> these are the only values of the slant parameter.  Does anyone know if
>>> other possible values could be generated?
>> 
>> Why not use font-slant-table, font-weight-table, and font-swidth-table?

> There is one problem with that: font-slant-table etc. are defcustoms,
> while custom-face-attributes is a defconst.  So if you want to use them
> to initialize custom-face-attributes, one possibility is to change
> font-slant-table etc into defconsts and move them from faces.el into
> cus-face.el.  Is it even useful to customize these alists?

As long as cus-face is loaded after faces.el, that won't be
a serious problem, since it's probably not very useful to customize
those lists.  I wouldn't have made them customizable, but maybe Handa
had good reasons to do that?

> On a related note, what's the story behind these settings?

> (defcustom font-swidth-table
>   '((ultracondensed . 50) (ultra-condensed . 51)
>   ...

> Why do we have a practically indistinguishable difference between
> ultracondensed and ultra-condensed?  Similarly with several other
> symbols in these alists.

Try to change it (or check vc-annotate) to see why: it needs to be
bijective (ie. reversible).


        Stefan