Re: Examining font properties under Windows

;; Really, we should get rid of these font.el dependencies... They ;; are still presenting a problem with dumping the faces (font.el is ;; too bloated for us to dump). So that _was_ you. I always thought so. Heh. I wish you luck. X fonts defeated Jamie, I suspect it will give you headaches, too. And then add MSFT et al on top?! ;-) How about the fontconfig API (used by Xft, but not tied to Xft or freetype)? Basically, it provides a C-level API which stores the various XLFD properties (including but not limited to the ones you can if you're lucky parse from a 14-hyphen name) in well-defined slots. If you have a better interface (such as the one used by freetype), then those properties automatically get stored in fontconfig slots. If not, fontconfig will try to parse XLFD names from fonts.dir and fonts.alias. It shouldn't be hard to adapt to snarf MSFT properties, too. Then there would be a canonical way to deal with this, instead of the mess we have in font.el and *face*.el What I'm thinking about is replacing our current "the name is the font" interface with a more sensible interface based on fontconfig, right down to the font-specifier component. Then all the Lisp functions you want are trivial wrappers around the fontconfig API. These wrappers are already mostly written (but misnamed as an interface to Xft) in the "Xft patch reloaded" thread on xemacs-patches. If you don't know fontconfig, I'll be posting a texinfo version of the docs shortly for use of the Xft experimenters. Note that fontconfig does not (AFAICT) depend on having anything built in to X. Although it is designed to be used with Xft, so there is a whole sub-API for finding out what fonts are available on the system, you _can_ ignore that, and simply use it as a standard way to store font metadata. (It actually looks a fair amount like font.el as an API, but I don't know how much "bloat" it would add to XEmacs.) Hrvoje> I guess I didn't realize what you meant by supported. For Hrvoje> example, a user cannot type `M-x make-extent', or `M-x Hrvoje> make-face' yet both interfaces are supported for my Hrvoje> definitions of the word. I was being a little unfair. I'm using "available to the users" as a heuristic for the kinds of reasons you didn't use the GNU names for the similar functions in XEmacs -- it's incomplete, a hack, doesn't really address the needs (of Mule users, in my case). -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.