Re: some utf8 chars are terrible small.

Ar an t-ochtú lá is fiche de mí Meitheamh, scríobh Stephen J. Turnbull: Let me lay out my attitudes before I go into this. The first priority of redisplay in font selection is to display a glyph that is recognisable as the character that was handed to it. That is: · If the user has chosen a monospace font, and no glyph is available from that font in that size, choose a glyph from another monospace font in that size. If a variable-width font is the only font available with that glyph, it is correct to choose the glyph from that font, and, for example, break any ASCII-art that the user is attempting to display because of the changed width. Jamie Zawinski disagrees with this, and is wrong: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156200 · Fonts with a big size disconnect, but with the corresponding glyph are preferable to blank squares. *After that*, once coverage has been addressed, it is appropriate to focus on what is a good fallback and what isn’t, in terms of size and style and so on. But the two problems are closely linked and it’s very easy to work on the second while the first regresses; I see this on Firefox on OS X currently, 3.X was better at finding appropriate glyphs than is Firefox 4.0.1. The XEmacs implementation of Fontconfig plus XFT doesn’t come close to server-side X11 in finding fonts for characters, mostly because the older ISO-2022-oriented Mule character approach suits server-side X11 fonts better. So for the specific example of TeX-escape-region.el you have the following comparison, with lots of blank squares under XFT and very very few with server-side fonts: http://www.parhasard.net/xemacs/TeX-escape-region-server-side.png http://www.parhasard.net/xemacs/TeX-escape-region-xft.png And once text gets a bit more exotic it becomes even starker: http://www.parhasard.net/xemacs/no-resources-xft.png http://www.parhasard.net/xemacs/no-resources-server-side-fonts.png http://www.parhasard.net/xemacs/no-resources-gtk-2-pango.png Note that the GTK screenshot reflect some local changes of mine, the other screenshots are with -vanilla and an empty X resource database. -- ‘Iodine deficiency was endemic in parts of the UK until, through what has been described as “an unplanned and accidental public health triumph”, iodine was added to cattle feed to improve milk production in the 1930s.’ (EN Pearce, Lancet, June 2011) _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta