I'm not having much luck here. I applied the first two patches and recompiled the .el files. I'm presently trying to get through this without using "custom" at all, or menus, so they probably won't make any difference. I've commented out my entire "custom.el", and copied all the settings to the bottom of my "init.el" as "setq"s. I have a manual call to "set-face-font" at the end of all of those. Whether this gets executed at load time or manually through "eval-last-sexp", it has no effect. The display of a shell buffer, whether repainted, or new, still has small unitalic fonts, and "apropos" on "shell-output-face" still has the old courier italic font (which displays as nonitalic). I'm not sure exactly what you're suggesting in the paragraph beginning "Sorry, untested suggestion ...". -----Original Message----- From: Stephen J. Turnbull [mailto:turnbull＠sk.tsukuba.ac.jp] Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 9:08 AM To: Karr, David Cc: xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org Subject: RE: Italic fonts show up as small UNitalic fonts There were patches submitted recently which may have some bearing on this problem (Custom was not setting specifiers properly, resulting in errors which apperently were caught and ignored). I haven't looked carefully at, let alone applied to 21.4, the patches. http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs-patches/200107/msg00092.html http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs-patches/200108/msg00000.html Try applying them; maybe that's all you need. The first hunk of the second patch should fail to apply to 21.4.4 (a different but equivalent patch has already been applied), but the second (the one you need) should work. These patches have no effect on other parts of XEmacs; I don't see how they can hurt you. If not, there are workarounds.... Karr> So do you mean to avoid using "custom" entirely, or just to Karr> not set faces/fonts with custom? The actual rule is "don't invoke custom-set-faces after directly manipulating faces." This is a problem, however, because custom.el is normally read after init.el. There are some patches by Didier Verna to make it possible to change the order, but I don't really undersatnd them: http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs-patches/200104/msg00061.html I think if you rename your custom.el and explicitly load by the new name it at the beginning of init.el, you'll get better results. (This only works in >=21.4.4, including 21.5.x.) This will cause problems with saving your customizations (this is the part I don't understand yet). According to the documentation for `custom-file' you should be able to setq that to the new name in init.el. It is possible that we will change the order in which custom and init are loaded in the future. Karr> When I added it before I loaded "shell", then it failed Karr> with an unknown symbol error. Sorry, untested suggestion. I don't recall how to deal with this offhand (this is one of the things that Custom automates.) Sick as it sounds, maybe the simplest thing to do is Customize the face (even though it won't work), which will get Custom to create the face when custom.el is loaded. Then put direct calls to set-face-font in init.el to override the ineffective Custom specifications. I also should have known better than to use font "courier", since you specifically mentioned that you didn't have an italic version. Karr> saving the file and restarting. Not only did this not fix Karr> the problem, it also seemed to not change anything. After Karr> loading it, I used "apropos" to show me the value of Karr> "shell-output-face", and it still shows a font string using Karr> "courier". Right ... if you are simply restarting, then when custom.el gets loaded after init.el, all your work may get undone. A simple test is to start up, visit init.el, go to the end of the set-face-font sexp (ie, after the close paren), and type C-x C-e to execute it. This should fix your problem (until the next time something calls `custom-set-faces'). (Changes to face specifiers takes effect the next time the Emacs frame is repainted, so it should be visible in the shell buffer immediately.) Karr> If you meant to avoid using "custom" entirely, would I Karr> comment out all the code in my "custom.el" and create manual Karr> "setq"s in my "init.el"? No, just use for faces should be avoided. Terribly ironic, since managing faces was the original motivation for Custom.... -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."