RE: Italic fonts show up as small UNitalic fonts

Karr> Well, I'm certain that I'm confused now. I still don't think the problem is your confusion (although I'm sure XEmacs's behavior is confusing the heck out of you). I think that Custom is confused. Karr> I actually had one session where the font suddenly showed up Karr> as "courier oblique" and said so in the apropos buffer. Probably you somehow managed to reset to default. Karr> At this point in time, I had NO customization settings Karr> active. Yep, that's what I expected. As long as you've got something you can work with, good. I may be back to you for testing if I get the nerve to do brain surgery on Custom. ;-) More detail in case anyone cares (erspecially if they might do something about Custom) Karr> [After doing] ------------------------------ (set-face-font 'shell-output-face ; face "-*-courier-medium-o-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" ; font 'global ; scope nil ; tags 'prepend) ; op ------------------------------ Karr> I used apropos to show me the value of the face, and it Karr> STILL thinks the font for that face is the italic courier. That's because `apropos' uses Custom to find out about the face, and `set-face-font' manipulates the face, not Custom's fantasies about what the face might be.. This is a long-standing bug in Custom. Custom assumes that the information it keeps on the face _name_'s property list is reality, and goes to fascist extremes (eg, it used to reset the default face, destroying _all_ non-Custom information, much of which Custom still provides no way to set) to ensure that reality matches its fantasies. Karr> It seems like this call to "set-face-font" has no effect. Try (cl-prettyprint (face-font 'shell-output-face 'all)) in the *scratch* buffer. Karr> By the way, my on my Windows XEmacs, running 21.4.0, my Karr> "shell-output-face" is using "Courier Karr> New:Italic:10::Western", which is an italic monospaced font. Karr> Is it just X servers which normally don't provide an italic Karr> monospaced font? <RANT> No, it's that Microsoft knows more about typography than typographers do, and decided that the traditional distinction between italic and oblique is irrelevant. If you look carefully, you will probably discover that Courier New:Italic is in fact not italic, but an oblique font (ie, a slanted version of Courier (roman)). Italic fonts have curved tails to give a cursive feeling, whereas roman fonts have horizontal serifs. It is possible to have an upright italic font; it's the style of decorations that determines whether a font is roman or italic. A sans-serif font (such as Helvetica---Arial in MS-speak IIRC) cannot have an italic version by definition, since it has no decorations. Thus a slanted Helvetica must be oblique. But Microsoft thinks its profits will be higher if it refuses to make users make such fine distinctions. It's probably right. :-( </RANT> -- 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."