Re: macos.texi updated

[Adrian Robert <arobert@cogsci.ucsd.edu>]

On Oct 9, 2005, at 2:16 PM, Richard M. Stallman wrote:

>     You're right..  But the population of "power users" in this  
> case for
>     whatever reason seems fairly large (just subjective  
> impression), and
>     the requirement to learn XLFD (to compose a fontset, or whatever
>     else) and partake of the pleasures of asterisk-counting seems  
> onerous.
>
> Is there a suitable font specification syntax in some other app that
> we could imitate?  I don't think it is worth while for us to develop a
> new one, and if it were unique to Emacs, it probably would not be very
> useful.

I agree that introducing yet-another-syntax just to eliminate XLFD is  
debatable.  But I'm not sure whether a second syntax beyond the lisp  
syntax used for font specification within a face that Yamamoto-san  
posted earlier on this thread is needed at all.  (I guess I was  
trying to say, "drop XLFD, and if some functionality is lost, update  
the lisp syntax to fix it".)  But if a second syntax IS needed, CSS  
(Cascading Style Sheets) might be one source of an alternative that  
is likely to be both easier to work with and more familiar to most  
users than XLFD.  It's also structurally more similar to the existing  
lisp syntax than XLFD, because it uses a similar attribute+value  
scheme.  Compare:

(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "courier" :height  
130 :weight 'bold :slant 'italic)

.default {
     font-family: courier;
     font-size: 13pt;
     font-weight: bold;
     font-style: italic;
}

Also, because the CSS format also supports attributes like foreground/ 
background color and borders, it could conceivably work for face  
specification beyond just the font.


>     XLFD should be removed from non-window-system-specific code and
>     replaced with a simple struct containing the same information.
>
> That is not a user interface proposal.  That is a proposal for a
> simplification of internals of Emacs.  Maybe that would be a
> simplification, maybe not.  In either case, I would rather we NOT
> change this now.
>
> But it has nothing  to do with the idea of presenting a different
> _syntax_ for specifying a font, so I think it is just a distraction
> from the issue we were talking about.

It is a separate issue (and I could/should have started a new thread  
I suppose), but it is related insofar as the exposure to the user of  
XLFD and the deep embedding of XLFD in the platform-independent face  
code are tied to one another.

In any case, I intended all of this discussion to apply to emacs 23,  
and to avoid unneeded distraction I'm happy to put it aside for now  
until 22 is out the door.