Re: Examining font properties under Windows

>>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic <[email protected]> writes:

    Hrvoje> The hairiest part might be looking up the appropriate
    Hrvoje> font.  The lengths that x-face.el goes to to find a proper
    Hrvoje> "larger" or "smaller" font are just scary.  But FSF
    Hrvoje> manages to do it -- somehow.

The last time I looked, GNU just punted.  The fact is that the "X
Window System -- the de facto substandard" that Jamie rants about so
entertainingly has grown up a lot.  If we could just get the children
at XFree86 to behave ....  So you can actually expect X fonts to have
fairly reliable properties most of the time for ISO 8859 Latin fonts,
for example.  The GNU approach (again, last time I looked) would not
have been satisfactory in 1993.

I think all we really have to do is to turn the "font" property of a
face into a cache for user specs given as XLFD or MSFT font names, and
separate out all the other properties.  This could be done reasonably
in two ways that I can think of offhand.  The first is to create
separate builtin (specifier) properties for each "important" property,
with a plist for any secondary ones.  The second would be to use
something like fontconfig.  I suspect this would not work very well,
though, because it wouldn't merge the way we want it to.

    >> It would help if you could check me on all the places that
    >> might hold face properties (specifier locales, but also
    >> extents; anything else?),

    Hrvoje> I'm not sure I understand this.  Extents specify Emacs
    Hrvoje> faces used in the buffer, when they're different from
    Hrvoje> `default'.  On the other hand, face properties are stored
    Hrvoje> in their respective specifiers, not in extents or anywhere
    Hrvoje> else.

    Hrvoje> Priority checking would work exactly like it does now, I
    Hrvoje> think.

OK.  But since font properties are currently merged as a block (ie, we
instantiate the first whole font we encounter), we have to be careful
to separate that out.  That's the main thing.

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