Re: Setting font to Lucida Grande on Mac OS X

[Sancho Neves-Graca <sancho@neves-graca.org>]

Thanks to Luc and Andrew for their replies. My posting fell somewhere 
between a user problem and a development issue. From the point of view 
of a user, he would check on the documentation for how to set a desired 
font on a frame, namely the font used by his operating system per 
default. But as soon as it is apparent that Emacs does not seem to know 
about such font, it does become a development question. Andrew 
clarified that the Carbon implementation of Emacs does not directly 
make use of the native TrueType font. Thus fonts kept in 
/System/Library/Fonts are not directly used by Emacs. There does seem 
to me to be a scarce availablity of fonts for the Emacs Carbon 
implementation. The default font (Monaco) is in my opinion hard on the 
eyes either for source code or XML editing, because the vertical to 
horizontal ratio of a letter box is too high. Contrast that with the 
default font setting of Project Builder (Lucida Grande Regular 11 pt), 
where the letters are much more well-rounded and pleasing to the eye. 
One working solution is to use good old Courier ("-*-Courier-*-140-*"). 
I have now built Emacs on Mac OS X using X11 and the offered fonts are 
others than those that can be set with the Carbon implementation and 
again Courier looks the best compromise. Perhaps with the X11 build new 
fonts for Emacs can more readily be installed.

On Monday, September 15, 2003, at 05:09 PM, Luc Teirlinck wrote:

> Andrew Choi wrote:
>
>    do something like this:
>
>    M-x set-frame-font RET -apple-lucida 
> grande-medium-r-normal--12-0-75-75-m-0-mac-roman
>
> I guess that gets rid of Sancho's concrete problem, but it does not
> answer the following question:
>
> Why does
>
> M-x set-frame-font RET -*-Courier-*-120-*
>
> work and
>
> M-x set-frame-font RET -*-Lucida Grande-*-120-*
>
> not?
>
> Maybe `-*-Lucida Grande-*-120-*' really is unmatched (I can not
> check), but look at the example below.
>
> The difference between a user question belonging on `gnu.emacs.help'
> and a question belonging on this site is that the answer to the former
> could have been found in the standard documentation, in this case the
> Emacs manual.
>
>> From (emacs)Font X :
>
>     You can use wildcard patterns for the font name; then Emacs lets X
>     choose one of the fonts that match the pattern.
>
> Not quite.  Emacs (or X) will not be able to find some fonts this way.
> Neither will xlsfonts.  I guess that if I were an expert on fonts, the
> example below would be obvious to me, but I believe that being an
> expert on fonts should not be a prerequisite to being able to specify
> a font for Emacs.
>
> [bash2.05b.0 ~ 3 1] emacs-21.3.50 -fn
> '-abisource-courier-bold-i-normal--17-120-*-*-*-*-*'
> No fonts match `-abisource-courier-bold-i-normal--17-120-*-*-*-*-*'
> [bash2.05b.0 ~ 3 2] emacs-21.3.50 -fn
> '-abisource-courier-bold-i-normal--17-120-*-*-*-*-*-*'
> [bash2.05b.0 ~ 3 3]
>
> Why does the second line work and the first one not?  Does `*' not
> match `*-*' anyway?  It does for `-*-Courier-*-120-*'.
>
> Is it possible to tell in one or two lines in (emacs)Font X what is
> going on here?  Or am I missing something truly obvious (even to non
> font experts)?
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Luc.
>
>
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