[oi-dev] Emacs has a bad font

[Alan Coopersmith]

GTK & Pango use fonts from fontconfig, not from X11, so it's not expected
to match xfontsel (which uses X11 fonts).  Among other things, Pango 1.44
dropped support for Type 1 & bitmap fonts, which X11/xfontsel still support,
leaving TrueType & OpenType font support.  One easy to spot difference,
fontconfig uses more natural names, like "DejaVu Sans Mono", while X11 uses
the older naming format with the 14 dashes separating fields.  Visually,
if the font is anti-aliased or LCD optimized, it must be fontconfig, as
the X11 font system doesn't support either technology.

https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/xorg-docs/fonts/fonts.html
describes the difference (using "Xft" for the fontconfig system),
but it's about a decade behind the latest changes now.

	-alan-

On 11/20/23 11:10, Gordon Ross wrote:
> As far as I can tell, the "system" font for mate terminal and such is:
> "DejaVu Sans Mono", or
> -misc-dejavu sans mono-medium-o-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0
> 
> Based on what I see with xfontsel, it looks like emacs may be using:
> -misc-dejavu sans light-extralight-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0
> 
> I tried playing with the options/Set Default Font in emacs.
> I'm not sure why, but emacs shows a lot less than xlsfonts does.
> 
> Here's what I have (from "save options") in both builds.
> (custom-set-faces
>   ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
>   ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
>   ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
>   ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
>   '(default ((t (:family "DejaVu Sans Mono" :foundry "PfEd" :slant
> normal :weight normal :width normal :height 113)))))
> 
> There seems to be a change in either the fonts or the rendering, from
> the older OI build to recent ones.
> The examples shown by "xfontsel" look too light in some cases too.
> I'd appreciate tips on how to track down this problem.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> On Wed, Nov 8, 2023 at 4:27 PM Gary Mills <gary_mills at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 08, 2023 at 05:44:42PM +0100, Andreas Wacknitz wrote:
>>
>>> If you are using the gtk variant of emacs
>>
>> That's the one I'm using.
>>
>>> then it relies on pango for
>>> font rendering and layout which in case has dropped support for older
>>> font types a couple of months ago.
>>> So your problem might be that you are trying to use an unsupported (by
>>> pango) font type and thus rendering results look ugly.
>>> You might solve this be choosing a font of a supported font type, eg. a
>>> truetype font.
>>
>> There's no indication of truetype in the list of fonts that emacs
>> displays.  In fact, emacs will often tell me that a font does not
>> exist when I select that font from its list.
>>
>>
>> --
>> -Gary Mills-            -refurb-                -Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-
>>
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