Re: set-default-font

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: David Masterson <dsmasterson92630@outlook.com>
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2020 21:47:54 -0700
> 
> First, I had been using a prebuilt Emacs v26.3 on Debian
> (Chromebook). I'm not sure how that version was built, but
> set-default-font did popup an easy font selection that (to me) made
> sense.  I could scroll through (lots of) available with an example of
> what the font would look like before I chose the font.

You can see the details of that version's configuration if you invoke
report-emacs-bug (don't send the bug report, just look at the build
description it produces).

> Second, I had a problem with the prebuilt and thought I'd try building
> Emacs myself.  After getting the needed libraries built, it built and
> works fine.  The main difference is that set-default-font seems to have
> completely changed to a popup for "Font Menu" with 3 items (Misc,
> Courier, and Fontset).  I don't believe have courier fonts loaded, so
> I'm not sure why thats there.  All 3 items have submenus with no
> examples of the fonts.  I think this is a Lucid style popup.  This is my
> configuration for Emacs (no options given to the configure script):

Maybe the original build was with GTK, and this one, with Lucid,
doesn't have the nice font selection dialog?  What you describe is the
Emacs's internal fallback which shows fonts known in advance to exist,
with no relation to the font back-end in use.  This "not nice" menu is
shown if x-select-font function is not available.