emacs and fallback fonts

emacs and fallback fonts

[Francesco Mazzoli]

Hi list,

I am trying to get emacs to fallback nicely when my font of choice 
(Terminus) doesn't have a symbol.

Using something like

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'unicode "DejaVu Sans Mono-10")

works, but then *every* unicode symbol is displayed using DejaVu.

I couldn't find a way to configure the fallback font only (without even 
caring about unicode, I just want the missing symbols to be displayed 
with a font that I choose).

This message seems to ask the same question: 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2011-03/msg00154.html , 
but there was no answer, so I am asking again.

Francesco.

Re: emacs and fallback fonts

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 18.3.2012 um 02:22 schrieb Francesco Mazzoli:

> I am trying to get emacs to fallback nicely when my font of choice (Terminus) doesn't have a symbol.

Do you know of any X11 application that can perform what you wish? How is it when look with vi(m), pico, nano from xterm with Terminus at the same places of the same file? How is the font selection working here? How are Open/LibreOffice performing?

--
Greetings

  Pete

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
				– Evan Esar

Re: emacs and fallback fonts

[Francesco Mazzoli]

On 18/03/12 15:35, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>
> Am 18.3.2012 um 02:22 schrieb Francesco Mazzoli:
>
>> I am trying to get emacs to fallback nicely when my font of choice (Terminus) doesn't have a symbol.
>
> Do you know of any X11 application that can perform what you wish? How is it when look with vi(m), pico, nano from xterm with Terminus at the same places of the same file? How is the font selection working here? How are Open/LibreOffice performing?

Well the current situation is that DejaVu Sans Mono is used as a 
fallback in all the applications. The problem is that Terminus-12 is 
smaller than DejaVu Sans Mono-12, so emacs squashes the bigger 
characters resulting in illegible characters.

I tried configuring fontconfig like so, to have DejaVu Sans Mono to be 
smaller:

<match target="pattern">
   <test name="family">
     <string>Terminus</string>
   </test>
   <edit binding="strong" mode="append" name="family">
     <string>DejaVu Sans Mono</string>
   </edit>
   <edit binding="strong" mode="append" name="size">
     10
   </edit>
</match>

But it doesn't seem to work, and I wasn't able to find a suitable 
configuration, so I was looking for an emacs-specific solution...

Francesco.

Re: emacs and fallback fonts

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 19.3.2012 um 15:21 schrieb Francesco Mazzoli:

> But it doesn't seem to work, and I wasn't able to find a suitable configuration, so I was looking for an emacs-specific solution...

See here for creating font sets which tell GNU Emacs which particular glyphs are to be taken from other fonts: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FontSets. The file can become large...

--
Greetings

  Pete

People say that if you play Microsoft CD's backwards, you hear satanic things, but that's nothing, because if you play them forwards, they install MS Windows.

Re: emacs and fallback fonts

[Francesco Mazzoli]

> See here for creating font sets which tell GNU Emacs which particular glyphs are to be taken from other fonts: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FontSets. The file can become large...

Yes, I guess I could manually set each character, but I was hoping for a 
more general solution...

Francesco.

Re: emacs and fallback fonts

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 22.3.2012 um 23:00 schrieb Francesco Mazzoli:

> Yes, I guess I could manually set each character, but I was hoping for a more general solution...

There is at least one! In Mac OS X a variant of GNU Emacs runs that asks the system's fonts service for a font to display a particular glyph. This fonts service is quite clever...

--
Greetings

  Pete

Got Mole problems?
Call Avogadro 6.02 x 10^23

Re: emacs and fallback fonts

[Francesco Mazzoli]

On 22/03/12 22:26, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> There is at least one! In Mac OS X a variant of GNU Emacs runs that asks the system's fonts service for a font to display a particular glyph. This fonts service is quite clever...
It works the same on linux with fontconfig, and still I am unable to 
configure it properly or find related documentation.

Maybe it's because I want something kind of weird (a smaller fallback 
font). I'm not even sure that's possible in fontcofig.

Francesco.