Re: configuring fontsets on Emacs+Xft (CVS)

[Taylor Venable <taylor@metasyntax.net>]

David Madore wrote:
> Is there a wizard around who understands how to configure fonts
> properly using the Xft-enabled (GNU) Emacs?  (I refer to <URL:
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/XftGnuEmacs >, and specifically
> to a today's checkout of the emacs-unicode-2 branch: I hope this is
> indeed the most sensible thing to take if I want an Emacs with
> antialiased fonts in (its own) X11 Window.  I realize that this is
> work under development, but there does not seem to be any better way,
> is there?)

I'm hardly a wizard at such things, but I have run into the same 
problem.  As far as I know, there is no other way to have anti-aliased 
fonts under X11 than to use the unicode-2 branch from CVS, so you're on 
the right track there.

> Having compiled with --enable-font-backend --with-xft, I now open a
> utf-8 file with emacs --font="FreeMono-16" (the FreeMono font contains
> all the Latin, polytonic Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew characters I need,
> plus a good many others).  Latin characters are correctly displayed,
> but for some reason Emacs insists on getting its cyrillic characters
> from some very ugly bitmap font

I had the same issue with Greek characters using the DejaVu Sans Mono 
font.  I'm guessing the solution is the same, so here's what I did:

(set-fontset-font
   (frame-parameter nil 'font)
   'unicode
   "DejaVu Sans Mono")

If I remember correctly, this tells Emacs to use DejaVu Sans Mono as the 
font for all members of the Unicode character set.  For this to work, 
you may need to make sure your buffer encoding is set to Unicode.

Unfortunately, this is about the one place where Emacs really fails for 
me.  It's a lot easier for me to enter Unicode characters in Vim than in 
Emacs, and it looks prettier too.  Let's hope it gets better.

Best regards.

-- 
Taylor Venable
taylor@metasyntax.net
http://www.metasyntax.net/