Re: Emacs 28: bitmap fonts, vector font character spacing

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Christoph Groth <christoph@grothesque.org>
> Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2023 15:15:24 +0200
> 
> I recently upgraded Emacs from 27.1 to 28.2 as part of upgrading to the
> new Debian stable and this broke my font setup.  I have something like
> the following in my emacs config.
> 
> (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(font . "Terminus-12"))
> 
> With Emacs 28.2 the default font is now much too small (I’m not even
> sure whether it’s still Terminus).  It is possible to choose Terminus
> with M-x menu-set-font, but this shows the same tiny font independently
> of the chosen size.
> 
> I noticed the following entry in NEWS:
> 
> > ** The Cairo graphics library is now used by default if present.
> > '--with-cairo' is now the default, if the appropriate development
> > files are found by 'configure'.  Building with Cairo is known to cause
> > some problems with bitmap fonts.  This may require you to adjust your
> > font settings, or to build with Xft support instead.
> 
> Unfortunately, this is not very specific.  Do “some problems” mean that
> fonts like Terminus no longer work and that I have to recompile Emacs if
> I want to use them, or is there some workaround?  I tried to find one,
> but so far without success.

Basically, Cairo dropped support for bitmap fonts.  So I'd expect them
not to work at all in an Emacs built with Cairo.