XEmacs 21.4.10 RC2 (and older 21.4 releases) have displayed big, ugly italic fonts for me quite some time now. Actually I've had the following workaround in my site-start.el so long that I had almost forgotten about the bug (?): (setq-default try-oblique-before-italic-fonts t) (custom-set-faces '(bold-italic ((t (:bold t :italic t))) t) '(italic ((t (:italic t))) t)) With only the setq-default part above, big and ugly italics go away in eg. cperl-mode, but not the startup splash screen. With that and the weird, hacky custom-set-faces blurb (yep, redefined just as they are by default), all italic fonts look correct. I've attached a couple of screenshots to demonstrate the effect, one without the above blurb installed (with-italic.png) and one with it (with-oblique.png) along with my installation info. I wonder if anyone else is seeing this, and if there's something that could be done so the fonts would look good out of the box? -- \/ille Skyttä ville.skytta at xemacs.org