Raymond Toy writes: Well, I'm not disputing you. I'm sure it used to work, since I have that line in my .emacs file. But then I couldn't modify the italic font in my .emacs. For example, if I wanted to make the italic font larger than the default, but still italic, I can put this in my .emacs: (make-face-larger 'italic) However, if the italic font hasn't been set up, this will fail (or at least, not do the right thing). What we could do is have the fonts set up after .emacs, but also allow a function `setup-default-fonts' to be called in .emacs, that will set them earlier. This way, I can do this: (setq *try-oblique-before-italic-fonts* t) (setup-default-fonts) (make-face-larger 'italic) Of course, this is truly ugly. Unfortunately, this is what we seem to need. -- Colin