Re: Another XEmacs/Gtk status report... (and a poll)

Bruce> Jonathan Harris <jhar(a)marginal.demon.co.uk&gt; writes: Bruce> Well, maybe. A font selection dialog doesn't do what I Bruce> want it to do: I want it to be easy for me to choose the Bruce> base fonts (default, italic, bold, bold-italic) such that Bruce> all have the same width. I don't want to have to choose Bruce> the fonts individually, and nor do I want to try to guess a Bruce> default font that XEmacs can guess suitable variants from. Well, maybe the default configuration doesn't. However, it should be possible (from what you wrote, I don't do Gtk) to configure the dialog to filter on the average width. That, in combination with the spacing type being either m(onospace) or c(character cell), should give you most of what you want (at least if the dialog itself remembers both last choice and filter). If there is a way for XEmacs to get its hands on the filter setting, then XEmacs could use that to make good choices of appropriate defaults for logically related faces. Am I missing something? But this is in theory: in practice some X servers will do horrible things if you try to do that (autoscaling, in particular). However, there are other problems that are similar but the existing dialog can't address; for example, I can't see how the stock Gtk dialog, which seems very XLFD-oriented, can hope to deal in an abstract way with the cultural differences in face usage. Eg (here I go again!) the emphasis distinction that in English is made with roman and italic variants of a single font family are generally made in Japanese with different families (the effect would be like having ordinary text in Times and emphasized text in Helvetica). Especially for Mule it would still be nice to have a "font theme" menu or dialog which pulled together groups of fonts which have no algorithmic relation to each other, but some "person of taste" thought go together well. Jan Vroonhof is working on the general concept of themes. Go Jan!! -- 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."