bos(a)serpentine.com writes: This sounds to me like your font is either incorrectly claiming to be monospace but, in fact, isn't, or your font is not getting picked up and used. In my X defaults, I have: XEmacs.default.attributeFont: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-15 For me, on a similar platform (Debian, but otherwise similar software), tabs (and other spacing) work as expected. Regards, Daniel

Bryan> On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 17:26 +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote: Bryan> I don't think so. The only font I have that looks like a true monospace to me is Courier. Have you tried that? Xft definitely does whatever it pleases no matter what you request, unless you're willing to work quite hard to make it understand that you're in no mood for backtalk. I haven't had time for that; maybe somebody else can do something with it? I mean, most of the time "what it pleases" is quite reasonable, and much easier on the eye than the BDF alternatives---this isn't a high priority for me right now. Patches are quite welcome, of course. -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

Bryan> On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 19:57 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull Bryan> wrote: Bryan> I tried all the supposedly monospace fonts on my machine, Bryan> and the only ones that XEmacs rendered correctly were Bryan> Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Courier, and Courier New. I don't have much hope, but could you pick a font that is advertised as mono but looks wrong in XEmacs, and do M-x set-face-font RET someface RET That Font-16:spacing=100 RET If you don't care about restarting XEmacs or otherwise doing something dramatic to recover, someface can be "default". Otherwise pick a face you can live with for a while if it's screwy. spacing=100 actually means "spacing is mono", while spacing=0 is proportional and spacing=110 is character cell. (If you know your way around the X includes, you could check to make sure those values are right in <fontconfig/fontconfig.h>, FC_PROPORTIONAL, FC_MONO, FC_CHARCELL, somewhere around l. 120. Probably under /usr/X11R6/include.) The font should be (a) distinctive and well-known to you and (b) quite painfully not properly spaced in XEmacs. You're looking for (a) you don't get some other font substituted and (b) monospacing. Bryan> Every other app that uses monospace Xft fonts renders them Bryan> correctly, but they're using Gtk2 and pango, not Xft Bryan> directly. It's possible that pango goes out of its way to compute appropriate spacing, but that seems pretty unlikely. There's got to be some way to do this at the Xft level, but all the documentation really sucks (most of it is written by Branden Robinson, the Debian X packager, not Keith Packard, the Xft/Xrender/fontconfig author). -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.