robert delius royar writes: > Stephen, > > Thank you for your help. With it I was able to reach an aceptable > compromise (see interstitial comments below). > > Thu, 22 Jul 2010 (23:40 +0900 UTC) Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > > > robert delius royar writes: > > > > > See the before/after screen shots at BEFORE: > > > and AFTER: > > > > That's pretty spectacularly ugly.... > > While I have found ~/.fonts.conf to be the main problem, I still cannot > get Charis SIL to display any better than in the screen shots. Have you had any further experience/luck with this?

I just installed the Xquartz 2.5.2 distribution on a MacBook Pro with Mac OS X 10.5.8, and I got definitely different display from my previous installation (2.5.0). I had no custom configurations. I put the file below in ~/.fonts.conf.d/10-autohint.conf, and as far as I can tell all of my fonts have returned to 2.5.0 form. <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig> <!-- Use the Autohinter --> <!-- This file is copied from /usr/X11/lib/X11/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf (Xquartz Project distribution version 2.5.2) --> <match target="font"> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit> </match> </fontconfig> I'm not sure I don't like the bytecode interpreter results better in my environment :-) but since the PNGs you posted clearly show a problem, I thought I'd post my experience. > After trying the steps you outlined below, I am now able to get > clean fonts drawing with Bitstream Vera and Bitstream Charter. I > like the latter, but I do not have italic or bold versions of > Charter, or if I do, they will not display in XEmacs. These set-face-font invocations work for me. I would not bet on Customize or the Options menu doing the right thing, though. Customize might work if you ignore the "bold" and "italic" options and type the fontconfig modifiers in the font family text field. (set-face-font 'default "Bitstream Charter-16:Italic" (current-buffer)) (set-face-font 'default "Bitstream Charter-16:Bold" (current-buffer)) (set-face-font 'default "Bitstream Charter-16:Bold:Italic" (current-buffer)) Note that the modifier for bold italic is ":Bold:Italic", not ":Boldtalic". I plan to do some work on Customize and menus later this month. Steve