Re: fail on osx between 2/4/2009 and 2/5/2009

[Adrian Robert]

On Feb 12, 2009, at 12:22 PM, Kenichi Handa wrote:

> In article <address@hidden>, YAMAMOTO  
> Mitsuharu <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > > > > > > On Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:37:43 +0900, Kenichi Handa  
> > > > > > > <address@hidden> said:
> > > I'm now thinking about these changes:
>
> > > (1) Revert script-representative-chars to the previous state;
> > > i.e. single entry for mathematical.
>
> > It would make nsfont_make_fontset_for_font work again.  But that
> > function is still a kludge that should be removed, and nsfont_list
> > needs to be changed so as to handle some  
> > of :lang, :script, :registry,
> > and maybe :chars.
>
> I fully agree.  If Cocoa's font-backend needs some other
> information to find a proper font, please let me know.

Hi,

It might be there is no problem, except that I was unaware of the  
significance of these various :xxx properties referred to above.   
When I first implemented the Cocoa font back-end, the list and match  
APIs were mainly based around the font-entity structure, which  
contained the following information:

foundry, family, adstyle, registry, weight, slant, width, size, dpi,  
spacing, avgwidth

Display of characters in multiple scripts was handled by the existing  
emacs "fontset" structure.  The "kludge" Yamamoto Mitsuharu refers to  
was designed to allow this mechanism to work under NS without the  
user or distributor needing to manually define a font set.  It works  
reasonably well, judging by the HELLO screen.  Of course, users /  
distributors always had the option to fall back to manual fontset  
definitions to get better results as in other emacsen.

However, if there is now an alternative method that the backend  
architecture supports, such that it is feeding 'script' and other  
properties additional to the font entity structure to the back end,  
and simply responding to these correctly will obviate the need for  
fontset specification at all, I would definitely like to change the  
NS font back end to use this new approach.  Is the complete set  
of :xxx properties the back end should respond to documented  
somewhere?  (I have been using font.h as the implementation reference  
until now.)

thanks,
Adrian