Re: Consistent vanilla Emacs

[Nicolas P. Rougier]

Can we instead choose a "decent" font among those installed and depending on
the system? Or is it already the case? In my case (OSX), the chosen system font
seems to be Monaco while the default system font is Menlo (or SF Mono if XCode
installed). Would that be possible to have an ordered list of font to try?

Nicolas


Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 15 May 2020 00:21:57 +0300
>> 
>> > 3. We currently don't ship any fonts with GNU Emacs.  Maybe we should
>> >     consider doing that?  It seems to me that many other applications do.
>> >     Or maybe we should introduce a stronger set of default fonts for
>> >     different systems.
>> 
>> IIRC Eli said that we can't distribute fonts for our own use only, 
>> whatever fonts are needed the user will have to install system-wide, or 
>> put into ~/.fonts, at least.
>
> Technically, we _can_ distribute fonts, but doing so will
> inconvenience the users to the degree that I think we should avoid
> doing that.  Installation of fonts on the system (with implied effects
> on other applications) is indeed that inconvenience.  It is true that
> there are ways to make the installation local, but that is even more
> of the inconvenience, IMO.
>
> So yes, I don't think we should include fonts in our distribution.  We
> could advise users to install fonts that we think will make Emacs look
> good, and maybe if we do that for some time, distros will start making
> those fonts available by default.  But forcing fonts on users is not
> TRT, IMO.  Right now, Emacs uses as its default font the font used by
> other similar applications, and I think we should continue doing that,
> so as to keep Emacs's text look as in other similar applications on
> the system.