Re: Examining font properties under Windows

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
 > >>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic <[email protected]> writes:
 > 
 >     Hrvoje> Good points, all.  I'd still feel safer if that kind of
 >     Hrvoje> work were done by someone who actually understood both the
 >     Hrvoje> 1993 incantations *and* the modern ones.
 > 
 > Well, I'm gonna take a hack at it ... I don't know if I qualify on
 > "understand", but Jamie ain't gonna do it :-)
 > 
 > The jwz stuff, actually, I understand.  What I don't get is the jv/bw
 > set-font-to-bold-forcibly-or-ill-beat-yer-brains-out stuff.

It's from the Lucid Emacs days where the editor was part of a
product.  The idea was that a user shouldn't have to futz
with faces to get the basic display features.  The dictum
was: The default, italic, bold and bold-italic faces must all
have a different appearance onscreen, no matter what font the
user chooses.  So the code worked very hard to make sure this
happened.  Once you know that default, bold, etc. will be
different, you can rely on using them for text properties,
emphasis in help and info windows, enriched-mode, font-lock,
and so on.

A problem with this approach is that some users will find the
ill-beat-yer-brains-out part of this oppressive.  If you're
nearsighted like I am and there are only a few X fonts that
you can use at all, then Lucid Emacs' fascist decisions about
faces could make the editor unusable.  At some point when I
was trimming code to improve XEmacs' startup time, I removed
the calls forced default, italic, bold and bold-italic to look
different.  The code to do the face pounding is still there,
but it isn't being used for that original purpose.