Xft patch reloaded

Hi there, we are both heavy XEmacs users starting XEmacs under various platforms and conditions. Unfortunately executing XEmacs under Mac OS X makes us almost sick all the time because of its unfortunate appearence (especially of its fonts) compared to all the other OS X applications. So we dug out the former Xft patch of Vladimir Vukicevic <http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs-beta/200012/msg00089.html> and revised it. (The Xft library, supported by XFree86, is a more sophisticated font matching scheme that supports nice antialiased fonts.) You can find the patch at <http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/knauel/xemacs-xft/xft-xem...;. There are also some screenshots available on Matthias's site to get a first impression: <http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~neubauer/xft-xemacs>;. If you wanna build XEmacs with Xft support, - apply the patch to XEmacs CVS version, - run autoconf, and - `configure' with the new option `--with-xrender'. Then just tell XEmacs to use a Xft font and you're all set! E. g. add something like this to your ~/.Xdefaults: ,---- | Emacs.default.attributeFont: Luxi Mono-11 | Emacs.bold.attributeFont: Luxi Mono-11:weight=bold | Emacs.italic.attributeFont: Luxi Mono-11:slant=italic,oblique | Emacs.bold-italic.attributeFont: Luxi Mono-11:weight=bold:slant=italic,oblique `---- Here's an overview how our patch differs from the original patch: - we added primitive functions for accessing and modifying XFTPattern structs on the Emacs Lisp level - there are almost no pixel artifacts (but still some ... :-) - we integrated Xft fonts into x-faces.el and font.el - Xft and core fonts can be used in parallel. XLFD's (core font patterns) and Xft font patterns are distiinguished by a regular expression. Please consider this patch a draft version. There a still some issues and lots of things that can be improved. However, we're not familiar enough with XEmacs' internals to cope with some of the problems, so we're hoping you as the XEmacs gurus can help us to test our patch, answer our questions, and maybe apply our patch to the HEAD later on... ;-) Questions/TODOs: - How do (x-)faces.el and font.el play together? We need some enlightenment. - TODO: Make fontmenu.el list available Xft fonts - TODO: Fix Xft drawing with respect to Mule - TODO: Enhance the performance on OS X, though it already rocks on Linux and FreeBSD. ;-) - What are x_font_instance_truename() and x_font_instance_properties() in objects-x.c good for? (Apparently never used) Matthias & Eric -- "Excuse me --- Di Du Du Duuuuh Di Dii --- Huh Weeeheeee" (Albert King)