RE: Turning off antialiasing

[Drew Adams]

> I just upgraded to Emacs 23.1. Good work! I have not explored 
> everything yet, but I am already impressed. I like the little
> details, like that isearch now displays which characters make
> the search fail.

Glad you like that. It's a very minor feature, but it does help. I first added
it to completion (in Icicles), then to Isearch (in isearch+.el, and later in
vanilla Emacs). 

If you like it in Isearch, you might like it even more for minibuffer
completion. There, you can use `C-M-l' to put point at the fail position. A
second `C-M-l' removes the suffix that failed to match. Because of the
possibility of delays for determining mismatch for remote files, there are a
couple of user options you can adjust, to get the behavior you want.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Icompletion#HighlightNonmatch

---

The big new feature for Emacs 23 is of course its Unicode support. As far as I'm
concerned, the Unicode support _is_ Emacs 23. Thanks to Kenichi Handa for that,
and also for enhanced font support. A tremendous amount of work, no doubt. Seems
like it touched everything in Emacs, one way or another.

> Antialiasing, while looking pretty, lets the characters seem slightly
> blurred, which, after a while, starts to hurt my eyes and gives me a
> headache.
> 
> Is there a way to turn antialiasing off, preferably without 
> changing the font backend?

Someone will answer you, I'm sure. I don't know the answer.

I'm guessing that the effect of antialiasing depends on one's platform to some
extent. On MS Windows, I wouldn't work without it. (There are some freebie tools
that allow for fine-tuning on Windows, BTW.)  

To be honest, I just skipped Emacs 21 altogether, primarily because of its lack
of antialiasing. For some reason, the Emacs 20 build on Windows is a great
build, and it antialiases. Emacs 21 was a (long) regression in that respect, on
Windows at least.

In Emacs 23, other platforms also have antialiasing now. Yes, it can take some
getting used to. The jaggies are crisp, but they don't resemble real characters
much. ;-)

> Ideally, I'd like to turn it off on a per-face basis; antialisasing
> is painful for me only with the default face, since it's this face
> in which I read large chunks of text on the screen.

Why not change the default face to one you like? Here are some suggestions:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GoodFonts

FWIW, I use "-*-Lucida Console-normal-r-*-*-14-112-96-96-c-*-iso8859-1" (on
Windows). (The screenshot on that page is fuzzy; the text on my screen is not
fuzzy.)

> Unless I overlooked something, I suppose the only way right 
> now to deal with it, is to use X ressources to prohibit Emacs
> from using xft, thereby turning off antialiasing entirely.
> Is that right? Or is there at least a way to keep using xft
> and turn antialiasing off from Lisp, which I'd prefer?

Good question. Did you check the manual? If you do get an anser, and you don't
find anything about adjusting antialiasing in the manual, then please file a doc
bug, to help others with the same questions.

A quick search for "antialias" shows that there is an `antialias' font property
for MS Windows (Emacs manual, node Windows Fonts). And the index suggests that
that is the only help for antialiasing (index entry `font antialiasing (MS
Windows)'.