On Oct 9, 2005, at 2:16 PM, Richard M. Stallman wrote:
You're right.. But the population of "power users" in this
case for
whatever reason seems fairly large (just subjective
impression), and
the requirement to learn XLFD (to compose a fontset, or whatever
else) and partake of the pleasures of asterisk-counting seems
onerous.
Is there a suitable font specification syntax in some other app that
we could imitate? I don't think it is worth while for us to develop a
new one, and if it were unique to Emacs, it probably would not be very
useful.
I agree that introducing yet-another-syntax just to eliminate XLFD is
debatable. But I'm not sure whether a second syntax beyond the lisp
syntax used for font specification within a face that Yamamoto-san
posted earlier on this thread is needed at all. (I guess I was
trying to say, "drop XLFD, and if some functionality is lost, update
the lisp syntax to fix it".) But if a second syntax IS needed, CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets) might be one source of an alternative that
is likely to be both easier to work with and more familiar to most
users than XLFD. It's also structurally more similar to the existing
lisp syntax than XLFD, because it uses a similar attribute+value
scheme. Compare:
(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "courier" :height
130 :weight 'bold :slant 'italic)
.default {
font-family: courier;
font-size: 13pt;
font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
}
Also, because the CSS format also supports attributes like foreground/
background color and borders, it could conceivably work for face
specification beyond just the font.
XLFD should be removed from non-window-system-specific code and
replaced with a simple struct containing the same information.
That is not a user interface proposal. That is a proposal for a
simplification of internals of Emacs. Maybe that would be a
simplification, maybe not. In either case, I would rather we NOT
change this now.
But it has nothing to do with the idea of presenting a different
_syntax_ for specifying a font, so I think it is just a distraction
from the issue we were talking about.
It is a separate issue (and I could/should have started a new thread
I suppose), but it is related insofar as the exposure to the user of
XLFD and the deep embedding of XLFD in the platform-independent face
code are tied to one another.
In any case, I intended all of this discussion to apply to emacs 23,
and to avoid unneeded distraction I'm happy to put it aside for now
until 22 is out the door.
_______________________________________________
Emacs-devel mailing list
Emacs-devel@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-devel
