Re: Decent fonts in Emacs?
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
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