Re: Lost antialias?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > > > I actually think that it might be not a good idea to change the
 > > > default font selection depending on the LANG setting.  What are the
 > > > advantages of such an approach?  Are there other GUI applications that
 > > > behave similarly?
 > > 
 > > It's fontconfig that does it, not Emacs.
 > 
 > But Emacs calls it, doesn't it?  So we could set up things for the
 > results to be consistent across LANG settings, if we decide that to be
 > TRT.

You don't want to do that.  The immediate counterexample is Japanese
and Chinese.  There is a complete overlap in repertoire for the
Japanese syllabary, as well as a 90% overlap in the most common hanzi.
This means that there will be no way currently available to Emacs to
detect the "right" font for text/plain;charset=utf-8 unless you pay
attention to locale.  This matters; Japanese and Chinese have quite
different tastes in glyphs, and as a non-reader of Chinese and a
non-native reader of Japanese, I have to say that to me, Chinese fonts
look more like pointillist art than text.

From the XEmacs sources:

    /* #### It's my branch, my favorite charsets get checked first!
       That's a joke, Son.
       Ie, I don't know what I'm doing, so my charsets first is as good as
       any other arbitrary order.  If you have a better idea, speak up! */

I've been ragged on about this on several occasions over the last
three or four years, but I still don't have a better idea---and
neither do my detractors.

I don't claim to have worked on it systematically, but with that
history do you think it's worth the hard work it will take to come up
with a "good" generic ordering?  That's up to you, of course.