Re: Fixed-pitch and variable-pitch faces

[Stefan Monnier]

>   '((t :family "courier"))
[...]
>   '((t :family "helv"))
[..]
> I think the font backend is matching these to non-fontconfig fonts.

Yes, I see that here too.  The problem appears to be that "courier" and
"helvetica" are proprietary/trademarked fonts and/or font names (I
don't know exactly, just guessing), so most GNU/Linux distributions
don't come with them.
Instead, they have things like "arial" and "courier new".

The old-way to solve it is to add those mapping to
face-font-family-alternatives.  But as it turns out, this is not enough:
face-font-family-alternatives already maps "helv" to "arial" which I do
have anti-aliased, but I also happen to have the standard set of
adobe-helvetica bitmapped fonts distributed with Xorg and this is given
precedence in the list because, well, we asked for "helvetica" rather
than "arial".

I would actually expect fontconfig to be able to provide such mappings
as well (tho it appears not to do it), so maybe there's a way to let
fontconfig solve this problem.

As for solving it within Emacs, I'm not sure what we should do.
Maybe rather than do

  (dolist (names face-font-family-alternatives)
    (dolist (backend font-backends)
      (try-font)))

we should just do

  (dolist (backend font-backends)
    (dolist (names face-font-family-alternatives)
      (try-font)))


-- Stefan