On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 03:11:57AM -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>
> On May 28, 2019, at 10:50, Richard Cobbe wrote:
>
> >> It appears to me that the first (i.e. liked) font is Menlo 13 while the 
> >> second (disliked) font is Andale Mono 13. I too like Menlo a lot and have 
> >> been using it in my Terminal since Apple started shipping it with macOS.
> >
> > Actually, the first font is Consolas, although Menlo is quite nice too.
> > The second one could easily be Andale Mono, as I do have it installed on
> > the machine, but I'm not really sure.
>
> You may have intended for the font to be Consolas, you may even have told X11 
> to use Consolas, but the lowercase "l" and "r" of Consolas do not look like 
> the ones in either of the screenshots. As best I can tell, the font you like 
> is Menlo, the one you don't like is Andale Mono. See attached comparison 
> image.

Huh -- good catch.  I certainly requested Consolas, but you're right,
that's not what's in the screenshot.

The odd thing is that, with XQuartz on my *old* MacBook, I *do* appear to
be getting Consolas.  The only difference that I've been able to find after
a quick investigation is that the font is installed in
/Library/Fonts/Microsoft on the old machine, rather than ~/Library/Fonts or
~/Library/Fonts/Microsoft on the new one.  I may dig into this further when
I have more time, although I really need to wipe the old machine and take
it to FedEx tomorrow for the trade-in value, or the offer will expire.

I gotta say, it would be so much more helpful if I could find diagnostics
or log messages from the X server on this stuff.  Are those written
anywhere that I can access?  As far as fontconfig goes, I know about
FC_DEBUG (see the fonts-conf manpage for details), and that's better than
nothing, but I wonder if there's another way to get additional info.

(Also, the behavior of silently falling back on an approximation if the
font can't be found is really not helpful -- I mean, sure, use an
approximation so I can get a terminal open and continue to investigate, but
maybe let me know that there's a problem?)

Thanks,

Richard

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