GNU bug report logs - #57962
29.0.50; Odd font choices

Previous Next

Full log

Message #65 received at 57962 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: luangruo <at> yahoo.com, 57962 <at> debbugs.gnu.org,
 Stefan Kangas <stefankangas <at> gmail.com>
Subject: Re: bug#57962: 29.0.50; Odd font choices
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2022 11:57:12 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

> Strange.  But I'm not sure I understand the meaning of the 48 think in
> the font's XLFD signature.

After googling "difference in font sizes", it's reminded me what I knew
before, but had apparently suppressed -- those numbers don't really mean
much, and actual font sizes just vary according to the font designers'
whims.

So there is no way to say "I have font X, give me font Y of the same
size".

So I think we just have to mitigate this on a practical level, and the
practical problem we have is that we expect a (fixed pitch) `default' font
to have the same size as the `help-key-binding' font, since we mix these
faces so much in our displays, and we want them to line up in tabular
outputs.

This means that we can either remove ":inherit fixed-pitch" from the
latter face -- and that would fix the problem in 99.7% of the cases.
But ideally, we'd like to have that face be fixed-pitch even if
`default' uses a proportional font (which is possibly, but very very
unusual).  To achieve that we'd have to implement something like

  :inherit (if (monospacep 'default) 'default 'fixed-pitch)

or something?

Or any other ideas?  (I've added Stefan K to the CCs; perhaps he has
ideas here.)

Previous Next

GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.