Subject: bug#18077: 24.4.50; Info-quoted face should inherit default

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 06:16:39 -0400

> What expectations?

The expectations of someone reading online documentation.  Most online
documentation I can find don't use bold, italics, or colors to
distinguish "technical elements" like those that usually appear in
Info-quoted face.

> And if it’s just *your* expectation and your preference, doesn’t it belong
> into your personal "init.el" then?

I indeed have a different personal setting for Info-quoted in my .emacs,
but I wouldn't want to push this as the default.

> Oh, well, they are of quite some importance, since they happen to
> demonstrate what this is all about:  That courier is not consistently of
> good quality, and can be a very poor font on some systems.

No need for a screenshot to convince me of that, then.
When I say "concrete case" I don't mean "please try to construct
a situation where this happen" (I can usually do it myself), but rather
"did someone involuntarily bump into this in his everyday use of Emacs?".

So, IIUC, this is still hypothetical.

>> Have you looked at whether or not face-font-family-alternatives would
>> provide a good fix?
> I’m not sure whether I can follow.  I mean, I could add an arbitrary “good”
> font as alias for "courier" myself, but then I could just customize the
> "Info-quoted" face right away (which is what I’m doing currently).

On those systems that have a bad "courier" font (probably
bitmapped), do they usually have another font that looks good and is almost
identical (but obviously under a different name)?

> And if the system can’t provide proper courier font or alias, how
> could Emacs do any better?

I think the best we can do is to choose another monospaced font
with serif.  After all, face-font-family-alternatives already has
a fallback to "fixed" as a last resort, so any monospaced font with
serif would be a better fit than "fixed".

        Stefan