Re: Face initialization

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard M Stallman writes:

 > I suggested eliminating the `font' parameter and instead
 > defining a function which sets the default face according to an
 > X font descriptor.

I suggest that the main advertised interface should use Xft/fontconfig
notation.  Even if the underlying internal engine is XLFD-based.  Xft
is trivial to translate correctly to XLFD form[1][2], more flexible,
easier to compose correctly, and quite possibly more familiar to most
users.

Of course there should be a helper function which translates XLFDs
(and even "loser" font names that are not XLFDs) into Xft form.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Admittedly semantics differ and this may matter, as some users of
XLFDs may prefer to specify size in pixels while Xft makes that difficult to
do.  Personally, I've had no trouble getting used to it but YMMV.

[2]  This may require some Emacs-specific fontconfig properties (which
will be ignored by the Xft font engine, of course), to emulate XLFD
semantics that Xft doesn't provide.  fontconfig is quite happy to do
this for you; the hardest problem is choosing an appropriate naming
convention for these properties.