Re: Visual font looping setup

[David Masterson]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2020 00:03:18 +0300
>> From: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
>> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>> 
>> You say that it shows small sample of each font. On my side for years
>> it shows just 3 major options Misc, few fonts commonly used on X
>> before 20 years, then there is Courier option for various sizes, bold
>> and slant and mix, and there is fontset. More than that never appears
>> there.
>> 
>> S-mouse-1 opens up same dialog.
>
> I guess the toolkit which you used to build Emacs doesn't have a
> well-designed font selection dialog.
>
> Do these commands invoke mouse-select-font or x-select-font on your
> system?

I have the same issue and we had this discussion several months back.
My personal build of Emacs v26.3 used the LUCID toolkit and doesn't
support XWidgets.  I tried installing GTK on my Chromebook (in the Linux
VM), but I couldn't get the Emacs build process to find/use it (helpful
hints?) 

Perhaps the Emacs Info pages need a small discussion on fonts and the
functions to use (beyond menu-select-font) and their expected effects?
For instance, more information about mouse-select-font for people who
can't (or won't) install GTK.

>> Do you mean that there are more fonts on your side displayed under
>> those options?
>
> Yes.  If your Emacs was built with GTK, x-select-font should start a
> GTK font selection dialog showing many fonts.
>
> Of course, you can always write a simple command that loops over all
> the fonts in the list created by this:
>
>     (x-list-fonts "-*-*-medium-r-normal-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1"
>                   'default (selected-frame))
>
> and display some sample text using each font.  Or just looks at the
> list returned by the above, and try some of the fonts manually (with
> set-frame-font or somesuch).

This is helpful, but people not knowledgeable about fonts may not
understand "some such".  ;-)

-- 
David Masterson