Uwe Brauer wrote: I'm happy to try that, but it'll probably have to wait until the end of the week due to other commitments. mike _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

Mike Kupfer writes: Yes, it is (in the sense of "randomness is to be expected"). I suppose the font instantiating algorithm is not finding the infinity character in the ambiguous fonts that have a size spec in them, and falling through to an ambiguous spec that does not have size in it. It then chooses the first font from the list that fits the ambiguous spec, and doesn't bother to backtrack to see if there are other candidates in the list for the font that fit better. I'm not really sure whether it's worth doing anything about this, except recommending that people use fontsel to find decent fonts with the characters they need, and add them explicitly. Really we need to move to fontconfig+Xft or perhaps pango. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

Ar an seachtú lá is fiche de mí Meitheamh, scríobh Mike Kupfer: XEmacs uses a character’s Mule charset to assign a font to it, and it never inspects fonts for coverage under X11 (at the time the code was initially written, X11 fonts in general covered everything they advertised, and I didn’t change that back when I was involved in this code in the middle of the last decade, mainly because there wasn’t a sanctioned way to look at a server-side font’s coverage.) For the just-in-time Unicode character sets, there’s a list of Markus Kuhn’s misc-fixed fonts, which have good coverage, built in to XEmacs: (let ((specifier-fallback (specifier-fallback (face-font 'default)))) (set-difference specifier-fallback (remove* 'x-coverage-instantiator specifier-fallback :key 'car :test 'memq))) => (((x two-dimensional final x-coverage-instantiator) . "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-140-75-75-c-90-iso10646-1") ((x one-dimensional final x-coverage-instantiator) . "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1") ((x encode-as-utf-8 initial x-coverage-instantiator) . "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1")) XEmacs uses the fonts it knows about for those characters, it doesn’t use the default font even if it’s available in -iso10646-1 (because most of the fonts available in -iso10646-1 have *very* limited coverage.) There is no user-friendly way to change these fallbacks. The non-userfriendly way is as follows, something I sent to Uwe a few days ago: (let ((basic "-*-courier-bold-r-*-*-18-180-*-*-*-*-*-*") (fallback "-Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1")) (set-specifier (face-font 'default) `(((tty) . "normal") ((x) . ,basic) ((x encode-as-utf-8 initial x-coverage-instantiator) . ,fallback) ((x two-dimensional initial) . ,fallback) ((x two-dimensional initial) . ,fallback) ((x two-dimensional initial) . ,fallback) ((x one-dimensional final x-coverage-instantiator) . ,fallback) ((x two-dimensional final x-coverage-instantiator) . ,fallback) ((x) . "*")) nil nil 'remove-tag-set-prepend)) Fontconfig is *far worse* in this issue, moving to it will not improve things. GTK2 with Pango has the potential to be much better without an inordinate amount of work on XEmacs’ part, and I have a few patches on my hard disk in that direction, but I’m waiting on a reaction to another email from Jeff before I go committing things to his repository. -- ‘Iodine deficiency was endemic in parts of the UK until, through what has been described as “an unplanned and accidental public health triumph”, iodine was added to cattle feed to improve milk production in the 1930s.’ (EN Pearce, Lancet, June 2011) _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta