Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Jorgen Grahn]

I've started upgrading my Linux machines from Debian 5.0 (which
includes emacs 21.3) to 6.0 (which includes emacs 23).  I haven't
upgraded my main desktop machine yet.

When I tried emacs on one of the upgraded machines, I noted that my
.emacs broke on the line

  (set-default-font "fixed")

and I also couldn't get to it using M-x set-default-font. I suspect
this is because Debian's emacs 23 is built with the Qt toolkit rather
than the good old Athena widgets.

- Is there a way to get to the "fixed" font in some other way, perhaps
  under a different name?  I find it's the most readable fixed-width
  font for programming etc; it has always been the font I've used in
  Emacs and in terminals.

- If not, can I rebuild emacs with Athena widgets instead of Qt?  I.e.
  is it optional during build?

If both are 'no', I'll build myself an emacs 21.3 instead. I'm very
happy with that version.

BR,
Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@  Oo  o.   .  .
\X/     snipabacken.se>   O  o   .

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Tim X]

Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se> writes:

> I've started upgrading my Linux machines from Debian 5.0 (which
> includes emacs 21.3) to 6.0 (which includes emacs 23).  I haven't
> upgraded my main desktop machine yet.
>
> When I tried emacs on one of the upgraded machines, I noted that my
> .emacs broke on the line
>
>   (set-default-font "fixed")
>
> and I also couldn't get to it using M-x set-default-font. I suspect
> this is because Debian's emacs 23 is built with the Qt toolkit rather
> than the good old Athena widgets.
>
> - Is there a way to get to the "fixed" font in some other way, perhaps
>   under a different name?  I find it's the most readable fixed-width
>   font for programming etc; it has always been the font I've used in
>   Emacs and in terminals.
>
> - If not, can I rebuild emacs with Athena widgets instead of Qt?  I.e.
>   is it optional during build?
>
> If both are 'no', I'll build myself an emacs 21.3 instead. I'm very
> happy with that version.
>

Just a couple of points to note. 

Emacs 23 is built with the gtk toolkit, not qt. 

The "fixed" font is not a real font - it is an font alias that points to
a real font. It could be that this alias is not defined in your system. 

Emacs 23 now uses anti-aliased fonts via xft. This greatly improves the
quality of the fonts and gives you access to the truetype fonts. 

Under emacs 23 and up, you can interactively select your font from the
options menu (and then save the options) or you can specify it in
.Xresources or on the command line. Have a look in the NEWS file for
some more details (i.e. C-h n). Using this approach, you get a font
selection box that allow you to browse and see samples of the font. 

With the introduction of xft support, you can now specify fonts using
the fontconfig font name style i.e. "monospace-12:bold". 

Another alternative is to set 'font-use-system-font' which will make
emacs use the Gnome system font (usually a monospace/fixed font). Emacs'
font will then change if you change the default gnome system font
(without having to restart emacs). 

If you can't get it working or don't like it, I would suggest at least
emacs 22 rather than going back to emacs 21. However, I strongly
recommend getting emacs 23 going as it has some significant
improvements, especially with respect to character encoding, fonts and
some nice new packages. 

Tim



-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Thu, 2011-02-24, Tim X wrote:
> Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se> writes:
>
>> I've started upgrading my Linux machines from Debian 5.0 (which
>> includes emacs 21.3) to 6.0 (which includes emacs 23).  I haven't
>> upgraded my main desktop machine yet.
>>
>> When I tried emacs on one of the upgraded machines, I noted that my
>> .emacs broke on the line
>>
>>   (set-default-font "fixed")
>>
>> and I also couldn't get to it using M-x set-default-font. I suspect
>> this is because Debian's emacs 23 is built with the Qt toolkit rather
>> than the good old Athena widgets.
>>
>> - Is there a way to get to the "fixed" font in some other way, perhaps
>>   under a different name?  I find it's the most readable fixed-width
>>   font for programming etc; it has always been the font I've used in
>>   Emacs and in terminals.
>>
>> - If not, can I rebuild emacs with Athena widgets instead of Qt?  I.e.
>>   is it optional during build?
>>
>> If both are 'no', I'll build myself an emacs 21.3 instead. I'm very
>> happy with that version.
>>
>
> Just a couple of points to note. 
>
> Emacs 23 is built with the gtk toolkit, not qt. 

Ah, sorry. It looked wrong when I wrote it -- GTK being more
GNU-related and all.

> The "fixed" font is not a real font - it is an font alias that points to
> a real font. It could be that this alias is not defined in your system. 

It is -- xterm happily uses it.  If it's unavailable to GTK is another
question. Unhappily, I have come to expect to have different
selections of fonts in different applications over the years. If it's
a configuration problem, it's one all my Linux installations have had.

And "fixed" /is/ real in the sense that it's the same, pixel by pixel,
on every system I've used for the last 20 years. (Except that time
when they changed the shape of ' in some ancient X11 release.)

> Emacs 23 now uses anti-aliased fonts via xft. This greatly improves the
> quality of the fonts and gives you access to the truetype fonts. 

[More Emacs 23 font tips.]

Thanks! But I'm one of those users who dislike changes, except those
we ask for. I don't personally want more font control in Emacs -- I
just want 'fixed'.

> If you can't get it working or don't like it, I would suggest at least
> emacs 22 rather than going back to emacs 21. However, I strongly
> recommend getting emacs 23 going [...]

I was thinking about 22, but the Debian people seem to have jumped
straight from 21 to 23 because of some perceived problem with Emacs 22
and Unicode. On the other hand, since I (you guessed it!) don't care
about Unicode either, it's probably nothing that would affect me.

I'll try Emacs 22 first.

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@  Oo  o.   .  .
\X/     snipabacken.se>   O  o   .

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Tim X]

Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se> writes:

>
>> The "fixed" font is not a real font - it is an font alias that points to
>> a real font. It could be that this alias is not defined in your system. 
>
> It is -- xterm happily uses it.  If it's unavailable to GTK is another
> question. Unhappily, I have come to expect to have different
> selections of fonts in different applications over the years. If it's
> a configuration problem, it's one all my Linux installations have had.
>
> And "fixed" /is/ real in the sense that it's the same, pixel by pixel,
> on every system I've used for the last 20 years. (Except that time
> when they changed the shape of ' in some ancient X11 release.)
>
OK, what you can try is use xfontsel to select the appropriate fixed
font. The 'fixed' font is not a real font - it is an alias for a fixed
width font with a certain specification. The xfontsel program allows you
to select the various font specification components. For example 

-*-fixed-medium-r-*-*-*-120-100-100-*-*-iso8859-1

will give you a fixed font with a medium weight and regular slant of
12pt size for the iso8859-1 encoding at a 100pdi resolution. Putting
this in your .Xresources or runing emacs -fn
"-*-fixed-medium-r-*-*-*-120-100-100-*-*-iso8859-1" should give you a
fixed width font. 

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Stefan Monnier]

> And "fixed" /is/ real in the sense that it's the same, pixel by pixel,
> on every system I've used for the last 20 years. (Except that time
> when they changed the shape of ' in some ancient X11 release.)

Eerily familar.

> Thanks! But I'm one of those users who dislike changes, except those
> we ask for. I don't personally want more font control in Emacs -- I
> just want 'fixed'.

I suspect that you'll have to specify the full font name rather than
the alias.  It's probably at least a misfeature, of not a bug, so you
might want to M-x report-emacs-bug about it.

> I was thinking about 22, but the Debian people seem to have jumped
> straight from 21 to 23 because of some perceived problem with Emacs 22
> and Unicode.

No, it's just that Emacs-22 came out too late for Debian-5.0, and
Emacs-23 came out early enough for Debian-6.0.  Nothing more to it.


        Stefan

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Sven Joachim]

On 2011-02-25 06:07 +0100, Stefan Monnier wrote:

>> I was thinking about 22, but the Debian people seem to have jumped
>> straight from 21 to 23 because of some perceived problem with Emacs 22
>> and Unicode.
>
> No, it's just that Emacs-22 came out too late for Debian-5.0

Wrong, it is actually included and the default Emacs version.  But Emacs
21 is also included, and people who did not have the "emacs" metapackage
installed were not automatically taken to Emacs 22 when upgrading from
Debian 4.0.

Sven

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 24.02.2011 um 21:57 schrieb Jorgen Grahn:

> - If not, can I rebuild emacs with Athena widgets instead of Qt?  I.e.
>  is it optional during build?


The configure script has no option to use Trolltech's/Nokia's Qt  
toolkit to build GNU Emacs with. The options are GTK, the default,  
Motif, Athena/Athena 3D/Lucid, or none (plus some exotic ones on Mac  
OS X).

--
Greetings

   Pete
               <\
                 \__     O                       __O
                 | O\   _\\/\-%                _`\<,
                 '()-'-(_)--(_)               (_)/(_)

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[PJ Weisberg]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 2:24 AM, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@web.de> wrote:
>
> Am 24.02.2011 um 21:57 schrieb Jorgen Grahn:
>
>> - If not, can I rebuild emacs with Athena widgets instead of Qt?  I.e.
>>  is it optional during build?
>
>
> The configure script has no option to use Trolltech's/Nokia's Qt toolkit to
> build GNU Emacs with. The options are GTK, the default, Motif, Athena/Athena
> 3D/Lucid, or none (plus some exotic ones on Mac OS X).

On Debian, you can install the emacs23-lucid package instead of
emacs23.  (I have emacs23-lucid installed and I have the
set-default-font function.  I don't know if that's the real reason
that I have it and you don't.)

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Stefan Monnier]

>>> I was thinking about 22, but the Debian people seem to have jumped
>>> straight from 21 to 23 because of some perceived problem with Emacs 22
>>> and Unicode.
>> No, it's just that Emacs-22 came out too late for Debian-5.0
> Wrong, it is actually included and the default Emacs version.  But Emacs
> 21 is also included, and people who did not have the "emacs" metapackage
> installed were not automatically taken to Emacs 22 when upgrading from
> Debian 4.0.

Thanks, so my "No" was correct, but its justification was not.
I stand corrected.  Thanks for the clarification,


        Stefan

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Javier]

I think the first message refers to these fonts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface)

I tried both emacs23-lucid and emacs23-lucid. if I recall correctly the
font behaviour menus do not access those fonts anymore.  In any case 
emacs23-lucid seems to be better in terms of speed.

You might try emacs -fn 10x20, emacs -fn 8x13... the -fn option works
with most X applications: xterm... Maybe the original misc-fixed fonts
are not installed anymore by default in debian because modern
distributions consider them anticuated and no-longer-in-fashion. They
did the same with console fonts and now you have to search into the apt
database to see the old console fonts back.


PJ Weisberg <pj@irregularexpressions.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 2:24 AM, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@web.de> wrote:
>>
>> Am 24.02.2011 um 21:57 schrieb Jorgen Grahn:
>>
>>> - If not, can I rebuild emacs with Athena widgets instead of Qt?  I.e.
>>>  is it optional during build?
>>
>>
>> The configure script has no option to use Trolltech's/Nokia's Qt toolkit to
>> build GNU Emacs with. The options are GTK, the default, Motif, Athena/Athena
>> 3D/Lucid, or none (plus some exotic ones on Mac OS X).
> 
> On Debian, you can install the emacs23-lucid package instead of
> emacs23.  (I have emacs23-lucid installed and I have the
> set-default-font function.  I don't know if that's the real reason
> that I have it and you don't.)
> 

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Sun, 2011-02-27, Javier wrote:
> PJ Weisberg <pj@irregularexpressions.net> wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 2:24 AM, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@web.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> Am 24.02.2011 um 21:57 schrieb Jorgen Grahn:
>>>
>>>> - If not, can I rebuild emacs with Athena widgets instead of Qt?  I.e.
>>>>  is it optional during build?
>>>
>>>
>>> The configure script has no option to use Trolltech's/Nokia's Qt toolkit to
>>> build GNU Emacs with. The options are GTK, the default, Motif, Athena/Athena
>>> 3D/Lucid, or none (plus some exotic ones on Mac OS X).
>> 
>> On Debian, you can install the emacs23-lucid package instead of
>> emacs23.  (I have emacs23-lucid installed and I have the
>> set-default-font function.  I don't know if that's the real reason
>> that I have it and you don't.)

Ah -- I saw the emacs23-lucid package, but assumed it referred to
Lucid Emacs, i.e. XEmacs.

> I think the first message refers to these fonts:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface)

That was indeed what I meant. Thanks.

...
> You might try emacs -fn 10x20, emacs -fn 8x13... the -fn option works
> with most X applications: xterm... Maybe the original misc-fixed fonts
> are not installed anymore by default in debian because modern
> distributions consider them anticuated and no-longer-in-fashion. They
> did the same with console fonts and now you have to search into the apt
> database to see the old console fonts back.

It's not *that* bad. Like I wrote elsewhere, xterm and friends use
"fixed", For xterm, my normal X resource setting is enough:

  xterm*font: fixed

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@  Oo  o.   .  .
\X/     snipabacken.se>   O  o   .

Re: Emacs 23, Debian and the "fixed" font

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Thu, 2011-02-24, Jorgen Grahn wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-02-24, Tim X wrote:
...
>> If you can't get it working or don't like it, I would suggest at least
>> emacs 22 rather than going back to emacs 21. However, I strongly
>> recommend getting emacs 23 going [...]
...
>
> I'll try Emacs 22 first.

I did, and it works well. I just picked the latest emacs22 as packaged
by Debian, modified it slightly and built my own .debs with just a few
temporary setbacks.

The plain non-Gtk version happily uses the "fixed" font. And as a
bonus, I could enable the traditional Emacs scrollbar. I had forgotten
how much better I liked that one compared to the "toolkit" scrollbar!

Thanks for your help, everybody.

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@  Oo  o.   .  .
\X/     snipabacken.se>   O  o   .