Re: Tragedy

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

rustom <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> On Oct 7, 12:35 pm, Tim X <t...@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>> May or may not be of use, but I encountered the same problem after
>> updating CVS emacs last Thursday. The solution I found that works under
>> X is to add
>>
>> Emacs.FontBackend: xft
>>
>> to my .Xresources file.
>>
>> Tim
>>
>> --
>> tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
>
> Hi Tim
> Can you explain a little what that does?
> A little context for asking:
> 1. Ive been running emacs (21 and 22) for a while under debian etch
> and ubuntu dapper. Some of the settings of background color etc are
> set in Xresources. And every once in a while -- quite randomly -- it
> does not work.
>
> 2. Recently upgraded the dapper to hardy. Now 'snapshot' is not 22 but
> 23.  Supposedly the font support is better there but in fact it looks
> distinctly worse.
>
> 3. When upgrading from dapper to hardy the upgrade broke on xfonts-
> scalable.  A little googling told me the problem is evidently in
> xfonts-utils.  Trying to set that up broke everything and I had to
> give up upgrading and go for a new install.
>

Current emacs cvs (aka emacs 23) has support for True Type and anti-aliased fonts and
specifying of fonts using the fontconfig or gtk font naming style. It
can also support otf and m17n for complex fonts needing more advanced
rendering support. 

The line

Emacs.FontBackend: xft

tells emacs to use libxft for font rendering. this will give
anti-aliased fonts etc. So now, I can specify my font like

emacs -fn "DejaVu Sans Mono-12" 

If you are finding your not getting good fonts, then its likely that
either you need to select a better font or you need to install some of
the True Type fonts e.g. font packages starting with ttf-

The xfonts-* packages are not TrueType fonts - they are the older X
windows fonts and on the whole, are not as nice looking as the TT
fonts. 

You should look at the News file that comes with the emacs-snapshot
package - all of this is outlined there and often has pointers to more
information. 

HTH

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au