Re: [Bug: 21.5-b28] Xft: characters picked from different fonts
Hi Stephen
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
I'm not really sure offhand how to deal with this, because the
user
may prefer all the characters to be consistent in a different font
rather than some characters in their favorite font, and others in the
"ugly" fallback font.
Comments on that point (is consistency more important, or is getting
your favoritve font most of the time more important?) are welcome.
Having all characters in a set (letters, box drawing, etc) come from
the *same* font (favorite or not) does make sense. I guess, that for
graphical characters (as opposed to textual characters) the visual
representation is particularly important. Think of a box created using
a box drawing set where the lines don't line up. Not sure how likely
it is in practice that a relatively small set (such as box drawing)
has been only partially implemented.
OTOH, it might be difficult to tell whether a given font provides all
characters in a set. Again, I have no idea about font infrastructure
and how any of this is done technically.
For you personally, the obvious workaround (find a more complete
boldface font) may actually be the right answer since you are fairly
sensitive to the differences in fonts.
Ubuntu/Debian(?) have managed to package the only DejaVu release
marked as "(these were broken)" :-)
I installed the latest Ubuntu snapshot version ttf-dejavu-2.28 and
checked DejaVu's status page[1], which claims this coverage
Sans Serif Sans Mono
U+2500 Box Drawing 100% (128/128) 100% (128/128) 100% (128/128)
Although it doesn't explicitly talk about bold variants, we find that
at least some box drawing characters are still not
supported[2]. Supporting these in Sans Mono Bold has been on the ToDo
since at least 2005[3].
(That's up to you of course, and the boxes *are* an XEmacs bug.
But
even if XEmacs provided a fallback glyph, it would be in a different
font and you would notice it, I think.)
"Noticing" is different from "eye sore".
I think a resonable algorithm would be:
1. Check if current font provides character.
Display and go to END.
2. Find variant of font that extends the default font.
Completely made up Example: We'd need to figure that there is a
font e.g. CourierExtra that has been designed to be used with
Courier, and extends it with extra (less common) characters. Is
there any way to obtain such information?
Display and go to END.
3. Check if other font variant (bold, normal, light, etc.) provides
character.
Display and go to END.
4. Find /any/ font providing character.
Display.
END
Regards
Marcus
Footnotes:
[1]
http://dejavu.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/dejavu/tags/version_2_28/dejavu-...
[2] http://dejavu.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/dejavu/trunk/dejavu-fonts/status...
[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.fonts.dejavu/596/focus=600
--
note that "property" can also be used as syntaxtic sugar to reference
a property, breaking the clean design of verilog; [...]
(seen on http://www.veripool.com/verilog-mode_news.html)
_______________________________________________
XEmacs-Beta mailing list
XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org
http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta