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 17:28:52 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 
> > Basically, Cairo dropped support for bitmap fonts.  So I'd expect them
> > not to work at all in an Emacs built with Cairo.
> 
> Thanks for the quick clarification!  Perhaps that NEWS entry could be
> reformulated to be more categorical?  “Some problems” sounded to me like
> there could be ways to work around the problem, and I wasted too much
> time trying to find one.  (As strange as it sounds, after staring at
> Terminus for a couple of hours on most days for many years I grew
> attached to it...)

We actually said that, but in NEWS shipped with Emacs 27:

  ** The configure option '--with-cairo' is no longer experimental.
  This builds Emacs with Cairo drawing, and supports built-in printing
  when Emacs is built with GTK+.  Some severe bugs in this build were
  fixed, and we can therefore offer this to users without caveats.  Note
  that building with Cairo enabled results in using Pango instead of
  libXft for font support, and that Pango 1.44 has removed support for
  bitmapped fonts.