Re: anti-aliased fonts

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs) writes:

> In article <87zlmptvry.fsf@lion.rapttech.com.au>,
> Tim X  <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>>"sashang@gmail.com" <sashang@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> Is there support for anti-aliased fonts in emacs? I installed emacs a
>>> few days ago and tried to use it but found that the fonts were
>>> rendered poorly. Some searching of the net revealed that I had to get
>>> a special snapshot installed (apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk) to
>>> get anti-aliased fonts. I find this surprising considering that it's
>>> 2008 and every other application I use supports anti-aliased fonts.
>>
>>What you are after has been introduced only in the CVS branch of
>>emacs. I run the CVS version daily and its very stable most of the
>>time. The emacs-snapshot is a recent snapshot of the CVS head and works
>>well. None of the stable e.g. released versions of emacs prior to the 23
>>CVS branch have anti-aliased font support. 
>>
>>The new CVS version has a lot of nice new enhancements that are really
>>catching emacs up to what most would expect from the worlds greatest
>>editor, including -
>>
>>        * Improved support for UTF-8 and other character sets
>>        * Anti-aliased fonts and support for better font handling using
>>          xft, otf and n17m
>>        * Support for dbus
>>        * User friendly interface to GNU PG
>>        * Some new useful packages, such as org-mode, nxml-mode, etc
>>        * A dired like mode for viewing processes in a similar way to
>>        * top
>>        * enhanced line wrapping options and more options in the option
>>          window to do things like set the default font
>>        * New completions and screen centering/moving features
>>        * Improved TRAMP 
>>
>>and lots more. Going on history, it will probably be a while before
>>version 23 is released as the next stable version. However, as already
>>mentioned, I find it stable enough to use daily at work and home. 
>>
>>Tim
>>
>>-- 
>>tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
>
> Please, where do you get this thing?
>

From the emacs cvs repository at savannah e.g.

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs

then I just do a 

cd emacs
./configure --enable-font-backend --prefix=/usr/local

check to see if configure finds all the necessary libraries (as reported
in the output from configure) If all is well

make bootstrap

and if all goes well, test by running src/emacs and if that all looks
good

su or sudo to get root privs and do 

make install

If configure reports that it isn't going to support xft, otf etc (the
libraries used to provide anti-aliasing and enhanced font support),
check the INSTALL file to find out what additional libraries you
need. Note that I'm not sure if the --enable-font-backend is still
required - I think it may now do that by default, but have not verified
this. 



Tim
-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au