Re: Miles' patch still fixes xfaces.c

["Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com>]

   I don't remember the issue.  What does it mean to "permanently change"
   this?  And why can't you do it?  What happens if you try?

By "permanently change", I mean, put a change in my .emacs file that works.

The problem is that on my screen, some fonts display an unreadable
bold face when bold is set in the default manner.  A buffer list and
the mode line put some text in bold, the the problem is very
noticeable.

My solution is to change the `bold' weight to `normal' and to indicate
`bold' by changing the the color of the text.

The problem has been that the method of setting bold has been
hardwired at a low level, so it has been impossible to change the
font in my .emacs file.

In other words, by default `bold' is treated as a hard-wired command
to make the lines on a glyph wider.  It should be treated as the
equivalent of @strong in Texinfo, which indicates an argument that can
be displayed in various ways.

For example, I want to change  mode-line-buffer-identification
in my .emacs file by setting it like this:

    (setq
     mode-line-buffer-identification
     (quote
      (#("%14b" 0 4
         (face
          ;; (:weight bold)
          (:weight normal)
        ...

but that fails.  The buffer name still is unreadable because the lines
that make up the characters continue to be wider than usual.  The
buffer name is not changed to normal weight, unless I apply Miles'
fix.

The same happens with the buffer names in a buffer list.

   Can Miles explain what caused the problem?
   Maybe we can find a better fix based on that info.

I hope so.  He predicted that his fix would cause Emacs to crash
occasionally, and he was right, although crashes are rare.

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         Rattlesnake Enterprises
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.teak.cc                             bob@rattlesnake.com