Re: Emacs antialiasing in X

[Jan D.]

> "Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> >     I would consider it a worthwhile use of my time to help in that
> >     effort.  Please let me know when you're ready to begin, if you'd like
> >     a hand with it.
> >
> > If you want to work on this in the branch where it has been started,
> > that can be done now.  There is no need to wait.
> >
> > The first step is to talk with the people who were working on it in
> > that branch.
> 
> That was the point of my posting.  The post I responded to seemed to
> be from the initiator of the branch, and he seemed to have specific
> plans.  I'm not volunteering to lead the effort, but I will help with
> the programming.

Well, the plan is to not do anything yet :-).  If you feel that you can
contribute time and effort, please go right ahead and check in whatever
changes you find time to do.  The areas in most need of work is font selection,
that is not handeled correctly.  The way Emacs faces specify fonts and how
they map to X fonts needs to be handeled in a way that is appropriate for
antialiased fonts as well.  Currently Emacs faces specify slant, size and
such and then translate to/from XLFD (the -courier-normal-*-12-*-*- notation).
This is not appropriate for antialiased fonts.  The calculation of the size
of the frame (lines => pixels) does not seem to be correct either, I suspect
the calculation uses the wrong font.

People has reported various redrawing problems also.

And then there is the whole i18n problem.  Specifically, Xft wants unicode
characters, but Emacs has its own internal (Mule) representation.  I think
we must integrate XFT and Unicode before this can be sorted out correctly.

        Jan D.