Re: Fixed-pitch and variable-pitch faces

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> 
>         Stefan "Who's already having nightmares of «FcFontConfig can't
>                 find my beloved misc-fixed-semicondensed-13»"
> 

Covered fairly recently - but anyway:
Have you enabled or disabled bitmap fonts in FontConfig? :-)

On debianoid systems, depends on whether you've got

/etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf
or
/etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf

symlinked into
/etc/fonts/conf.d/

(After changing this, run fc-cache -fv )

If you have bitmaps enabled, then the X.org standard misc-fixed bitmap
font is typically in the default path for fontconfig.

This means you can use your beloved misc-fixed with *only the xft emacs
fontbackend enabled*:

emacs -Q --font "Fixed-10:foundry=Misc:style=SemiCondensed"

(Note that 10 is a point size not a pixel size in xft, it
probably comes out as the "13" you want)

While doing this can make xft *look* for all practical purposes like the
X backend (lack of antialiasing and all!), n.b. the xft backend font is
still client-side rather than the server-side x backend case.
i.e. the emacs binary has to be able to find the relevant .pcf file* in
the xft backend case, the x server has to be able to find the relevant
.pcf file (or an xfs serving it) in the x backend case.


* i.e. the misc-fixed bitmap font.