Re: Emacs master: different (ugly) font in org-mode [Windows, macOS]

[Protesilaos Stavrou]

On 2021-10-06, 14:48 +0300, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>> Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2021 21:45:02 +0200 (CEST)
>> From: Angelo Graziosi <angelo.g0@libero.it>
>> Cc: info@protesilaos.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> Have you see the screenshots attached here: 
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-10/msg00064.html?
>> 
>> In my opinion Courier is very ugly...
>
> Well, "ugly" is a subjective opinion.  It's okay not to like it, but
> it isn't necessarily a good reason to call for any changes in the
> defaults.  (I'm aware that it wasn't you who suggested the change.)
> Making fixed-pitch use the same font as the default font basically
> does away with fixed-pitch as a distinct face.  That makes little
> sense to me.  AFAIR, Courier was chosen to make sure the face will be
> usable on all Windows versions.  We tried to use other alternative
> fonts that are always present on Windows systems, but they all had
> problems.

On every GNU/Linux distro I have checked, the "Monospace" label is an
alias for a fallback font family controlled by the fontconfig library.
This usually ends up being "DejaVu Sans Mono".

Desktop Environments (e.g. Xfce) should be able to change the default
fonts through their settings.  Otherwise the user can set up fontconfig
rules directly.

I was the one who entertained the idea of a change to 'fixed-pitch',
though I wasn't aware that the "Monospace" font alias would work on
Windows/Mac.  Since it does, no change is required.  It is up to the
user to edit their system's default fonts.

For Emacs-specific configurations, it is possible to set the ':family'
attribute of the 'default', 'fixed-pitch', 'variable-pitch' faces, such
as in the example I shared in the original reply to this thread.

-- 
Protesilaos Stavrou
https://protesilaos.com