Re: 23.0.60; Heavy display problems with new font backend

[David Hansen]

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:59:04 -0700 address@hidden wrote:

> David Hansen writes:
>> Looks far better with disabled font backend:
>> 
>> http://www.alice-dsl.net/david.hansen/comb.png
>
> A fellow Neep Alt-er!  Have you also tried the Neep Alt ISO10646-1
> registry fonts from Debian's xfonts-jmk package?  When I use the
> ISO10646 fonts with the new font backend, Emacs seems to think that
> the font is missing large quantities of codepoints.  Left and right
> quotes, for example, show up using double-width Chinese fonts.  I'm
> curious whether other people see the same thing.

I noticed that problem not only with the neep font but also with Monaco
and the fairly complete DejaVu Mono font.  I even reported it as a bug,
but it may be possible that this is some limited understanding of
dealing with fontsets on my side.

It may be worth a look how rxvt selects fonts.  When looking at the
unicode test file it looks far better in urxvt, no matter which font I
specify as the default.

> Since the whole Neep Alt ISO10646 font collection is a hack (it's
> Neep Alt ISO8859-1 superimposed on Misc-Fixed ISO10646), there's
> always a chance that there's something wrong in the font itself, but
> everything shows up just fine in xterm.  When I have the time I'm
> planning on digging into Xft as the next suspect.

Well, if you want to use the good old bitmap fonts anyway it's probably
not worth.  These antialiased fonts look nice if they are huge black
letters on a bright background.  Small characters just look like s...,
especially with white fg on black bg.  I think I'll just use the old
font handling as long as possible.

David