Upfront I want to thank Christoph for his work on X-symbol since he seems to move onto other things soon. radford(a)robby.caltech.edu (Jim Radford) writes: I would even go so far as to suggest leaving out the "-w". The perl "-w" switch is a great development aid, but is it really needed show any warnings to potentially unsuspecting user. The problem is that the X server does not necessarily run on the same host as the prorgam is running. The proper way to do it (at least that is what programs like LyX etc that need their own fonts seem to do) seem to be to act as a font server yourself. Anyway I still think having the X(Set|Get)FontPath callable form XEmacs would be nice. Wasn't there a patch for FSF Emacs that lets you call arbitrary xlib functions from elisp? Please read the 'Rules When Writing New C Code' section of the "Internals" manual. Especially the "Coding for Mule" section. You need to make sure the strings are property converted to the internal MULE string format. I think in this case you need build_ext_string with a FORMAT_FILENAME argument. We have been busy stamping out bugs like this in the last month so it would be unwise to introduce new ones. Conversely you probably want GET_C_CHARPTR_EXT_FILENAME_DATA_ALLOCA Jan