Re: macos.texi updated

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:30:45 -0700


On Oct 11, 2005, at 10:44 AM, Richard M. Stallman wrote:

      (I guess I was  
    trying to say, "drop XLFD, and if some functionality is lost, update  
    the lisp syntax to fix it".)

We don't need to change Emacs for that.  You should be able, already,
to do whatever you like in Emacs without using XLFD syntax.  What is there
that cannot be done except with XLFD syntax?

Since I use Emacs on Aqua, which does not expose XLFD anywhere, I can't speak directly as a user.  But looking at the situation from the inside on the unicode-2 branch, it appears that there are several major places in the code that expect all of the information for specifying a font to be contained in a single string.  At the elisp-wielding-user-visible level this manifests in what you pass to and get back from x-list-fonts, as well as any font-setting functions, setting font as a frame parameter, etc...  I can't tell whether other platforms could use some other single-string-specifies-all format besides XLFD (not that this would be natural), or if other code in fontset.c and xfaces.c requires these names to be XLFD.  All I know is that in the Cocoa port, I'm having trouble getting the full font machinery working without putting all font info into string names.

In any case, both lisp code and user mailing list traffic for the Mac Carbon emacs contain numerous references to XLFD.  E.g.:

See for example:



Anyway, I will drop this now due to an intense lack of interest from anyone else on this list ;), and come back when 22 is out and/or I have some code to show..


  I think perhaps some
command line option uses it.  We could replace that option with
one that uses a different syntax, but what syntax should it be?

    .default {
     font-family: courier;
     font-size: 13pt;
     font-weight: bold;
     font-style: italic;
    }

I don't think that is useful in an Emacs context.
It is no easier to type, no more concise, than a list
of face attributes in Lisp syntax.  Where would we possibly
want to use it?

My point was that the XLFD is so concise and cryptic as to be a real hassle no matter what it's used for.  I really don't see any typing savings for something like

emacs -font '-*-courier-*-*-*--12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*'

or even

emacs -font '-*-courier-*-*-*--12-*'

vs.

emacs -font '{ font-family: courier font-size: 12pt }'

If you're not cutting/pasting the font, counting out how many asterisks you need and deciding where to put the '12' are far more time-consuming than punching out the few extra characters for CSS-style.  And if you are cutting/pasting, there's no difference, besides readability.

But given that things are as they are, I see no reason to add a new syntax either if it's not needed for lisp customization -- using XLFD on the command line seems fine since users on the non-X systems rarely use command-line invocation anyhow.

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