[Bug: 21.4.17] Proportional font too large

[Ralf Angeli]

* Aidan Kehoe (2005-03-17) writes:

>  Ar an seachtú lá déag de mí Márta, scríobh Ralf Angeli: 
>
>  > If that's the same font I am using, try to imagine how it looks on a
>  > 120dpi display.
>
>:-) 112 locally. 

Hm, that's not much difference.  And you consider the font to be huge?
Either you have a magnifying glass in front of your display or eagle
eyes. (c:

>  > > "-Adobe-Helvetica-Medium-R-Normal--25-180-100-100-P-130-ISO8859-1"
>  > 
>  > Here this returns
>  > 
>  > "-urw-nimbus sans l-regular-r-condensed--42-300-100-100-p-194-iso8859-1"
[...]
> Okay, if you move the 100dpi directory befor the Type1 directory in either
> the font path of your X server or of your font server, as appropriate, you
> should get a much better looking font. (You may need to install some package
> to make it available.) There’s nothing wrong with the URW font, it’s just
> that the XFree86 Type1 font renderer is unfinished, and as such the bitmap
> (.pcf) fonts are much better when they’re available.

There is no font server running here.

I moved the Type1 directory to the last position of the list of font
paths and restarted the X server.  After this the font looked even
worse, i.e. it was as large as the URW font but with rough edges.
Here is what (font-truename ...) returned:

"-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--42-300-100-100-p-223-iso8859-1"

This is probably aliased to the URW font but I don't know which font
package to install in order to get the real Adobe Helvetica; at least
xfonts-100dpi-transcoded and xfonts-75dpi-transcoded did not do the
trick.

> Strangely, I get 
>
> "-urw-nimbus sans l-medium-r-condensed--19-180-75-75-p-85-iso8859-1"
>
> when I repeat your steps but with nimbus sans l instead of helvetica; if you
> are using a font server, there’s a default DPI setting there that may
> explain our differences. 

Hm, I have a DisplaySize statement in my XF86Config-4 file, maybe this
has some influence.


Anyway, the reason I am asking is that AUCTeX uses a proportional font
for displaying section headings.  Now if other people have a similar
setup like me, the section headings will come out in the totally wrong
size.  That means playing around with the X server configuration is
not really a solution.  It would be better if XEmacs could
display/choose the font in the right size.

I found that I can help XEmacs a bit if I explicitely specify the size
of the face.  That means when customizing the face it does not come
out as big as before if I activate the "Size" specifier and insert
"18pt" besides the "helvetica" for the font family.  But it still is
noticably larger than the 18-pixel default font.

-- 
Ralf