Re: Font slants

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> When I do M-x customize-face RET default RET, the value of the `default'
>> face is given as a Lisp expression instead of the usual value menus.
>> This occurs because the slant of the face, as supplied by the new font
>> engine, is "roman".
>
>> I just committed the following patch to fix this.  However, I'm not sure
>> these are the only values of the slant parameter.  Does anyone know if
>> other possible values could be generated?
>
> Why not use font-slant-table, font-weight-table, and font-swidth-table?

There is one problem with that: font-slant-table etc. are defcustoms,
while custom-face-attributes is a defconst.  So if you want to use them
to initialize custom-face-attributes, one possibility is to change
font-slant-table etc into defconsts and move them from faces.el into
cus-face.el.  Is it even useful to customize these alists?

On a related note, what's the story behind these settings?

(defcustom font-swidth-table
  '((ultracondensed . 50) (ultra-condensed . 51)
  ...

Why do we have a practically indistinguishable difference between
ultracondensed and ultra-condensed?  Similarly with several other
symbols in these alists.