Itai> well, it DOESNT work for me. and it seems that this IS the problem: on my Itai> system the italic font are in weird sizes, the oblique are right. Itai> just a layman's question, though a bit off the subject: what's the Itai> difference between oblique and italic? and why the wrong sizes in italics? This is based on my very limited understanding of X11 and fonts, and may be specific to my machine/setup on Solaris. The standard bitmapped X11 font for adobe-courier calls its italic font "oblique" instead of "italic". From a non-typography view, I think they're just different names for the same thing, but I may be wrong. However, if you have Type1 scalable fonts available (as I do), I think when xemacs requests an italic version of adobe-courier, the X11 server sees that there is an adobe-courier Type1 font and tries to render an italic version. This is the ugly. Itai> and why doesnt *try-oblique-before-italic-fonts* do its job? That was what it was for and obviously something changed between b65 and b66 so that it doesn't. Ray