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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 1997 06:37:48 -0800
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From: "William M. Perry" <wmperry@aventail.com>
To: Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com>
Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Re: Suggestion and general remarks regarding faces.
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Steven L. Baur writes:
>>>>>> "Jens" == Jens Lautenbacher <jens@lemcbed.lem.uni-karlsruhe.de> writes:

>Jens> The new custom.el should be used to edit faces and save the
>Jens> edited values instead.
>
>The new custom is not compatible with the old, and would necessitate
>waiting for completion of Gnus 5.4 and the latest round of w3 changes.
>
>19.15 has got to be released ASAP.  My sanity requires it.  Two source
>code trees is driving me mad, and is getting in the way of doing more
>useful things than applying every patch twice, etc.
>
>We will be moving to the new custom in time, and I hope to see it
>(after the interface to it has been cleaned & prettied up) become the
>standard mechanism for customizing the whole editor.  I don't think
>now is the right time.

  One thing that I think should be in the next feature-ful XEmacs release
(as opposed to just bug-fixing) is a new font-model.  I've talked to chuck
and ben and RMS a little about this, and have a POC version worked up in
Elisp (font.el in the w3 distributions).

  What we need is something closer to the windows logical font model,
accessible at the lisp level.  With the current font package, you can
specify:

(setq my-font (make-font :size "24pt"
                         :family '("arial" "ookla" "sans-serif")))
-> [:family ("arial" "ookla" "sans-serif") :weight nil :style 0 :size "24pt" :registry nil :encoding nil]

The :family property allows you to specify an arbitrarily long list of font
families to use to satisfy a font request.  So if 24pt arial is not
available on your system, it will try to find 24pt ookla, and if that is
not available, then any 24pt sans-serif font will do.  Sizes can be
specified in points, pixels, inches, centimeters, picas, etc.

If anyone has time to try to implement this in C (you'd need to have a new
resolve_font device-methd), let me know and we can talk about it.  I don't
think I'll have time for a few months to actually implement it myself.

-Bill P.

