Decent fonts in Emacs?

2008-10-24 Thread Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum
Hi. Im running Gnome under Lenny.

Im trying to get Emacs to work with some decent fonts that show some special 
characters in a document, things like an fi or fl ligature, or
some other odd things like that (ellipsis).

When i look at these files in gedit, or even in the terminal wiht more, they 
look OK, but in Emacs i get square boxes or blank spaces everywhere.

I read the Emacs wiki all over, and i installed emacs-gtk, installed 
x-ttcidfont-conf, restarted X. But things are still difficult.

From the font menu in Emacs i can still only choose the basic fonts, not TTF 
ones. gedit tells me im using the system font, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 10, 
but when i try to get the full name for this with xfontsel and then put this 
into Emacs, it looks nothing like it does in gedit,
its much larger, and i still cant select
different things easily.

Is there any simple set of instructions i can get to be albe to have decent 
looking fonts in Emacs for this purpose? Why does it have to
be so hard? :-(

The most important thing is that i can see these different characters.

Jen


  


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: Decent fonts in Emacs?

2008-10-24 Thread Sven Joachim
On 2008-10-24 19:11 +0200, Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum wrote:

 Hi. Im running Gnome under Lenny.

 Im trying to get Emacs to work with some decent fonts that show some
 special characters in a document, things like an fi or fl
 ligature, or some other odd things like that (ellipsis).

 When i look at these files in gedit, or even in the terminal wiht
 more, they look OK, but in Emacs i get square boxes or blank spaces
 everywhere.

That's because the font Emacs uses (Courier, by default) does not
contain the characters in question.

 I read the Emacs wiki all over, and i installed emacs-gtk, installed
 x-ttcidfont-conf, restarted X. But things are still difficult.

As of version 22, Emacs only supports XLFD fonts with fixed width.

 From the font menu in Emacs i can still only choose the basic fonts,
 not TTF ones. gedit tells me im using the system font, Bitstream Vera
 Sans Mono 10, but when i try to get the full name for this with
 xfontsel and then put this into Emacs, it looks nothing like it does
 in gedit, its much larger, and i still cant select different things
 easily.

 Is there any simple set of instructions i can get to be albe to have
 decent looking fonts in Emacs for this purpose? Why does it have to be
 so hard? :-(

Because Emacs is a very old application that until very recently had not
been ported to modern times.  TT fonts are simply not supported in Emacs
22 under X, believe it or not.

 The most important thing is that i can see these different characters.

You can run Emacs in a terminal (with the -nw option), then it displays
whatever characters the terminal font supports.  The Bitstream Vera or
DejaVu fonts in their Mono variant are quite comprehensive.

Another option is to use the development version of Emacs, available as
a Debian package at http://emacs.orebokech.com.  That version has full
support for Truetype and variable-width fonts, anti-aliasing and also a
much better font menu (uses a standard GTK font selection dialog).

Be aware, however, that this version is a development snapshot and may
have serious regressions.  That being said, I use it successfully all
day, and the main problem with it is that many of the new features are
poorly documented.  Also, it is somewhat slower than Emacs 22; depending
on your machine, you may or may not notice this.

Sven


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]