[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: 
>
>  > 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.
>
> Hmm, I could have sworn that the XFree86 people turned off the scaling of
> bitmap fonts by default before 4.3.0. I think it is the bitmap Adobe
> font--if it _had_ been aliased to the URW font, the font-truename would have
> returned “nimbus sans l” as its name. Perhaps Debian have re-enabled bitmap
> font scaling on your system.

This could well be because AFAIK they patched it up with many things
done during development of 4.4.0 until the point the licence was
changed.

> There’s always a certain amount of gambling when choosing a default font as
> an application in X11; the most important thing, and it can be surprisingly
> easy to have that fail, is to not have the app crash[1]. After that, well,
> if someone has an atypical setup, and their fonts look horrible, that’s not
> sometyhing you can avoid. 

As you are referring to GNU Emacs with the crash you are mentioning, I
am tempted to refer to it as well when I say that there are
applications which actually are able to avoid horribly looking
fonts. (c;

>  > 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.
>
> Oww! When I do that on my machine, it’s even huger and more surprising.
> Though perhaps just about acceptable for section
> headings. “-Adobe-Helvetica-Medium-R-Normal--25-180-100-100-P-130-ISO8859-1”
> is the full xlfd. 

That's actually what I am getting as well.  So XEmacs seems to have a
problem only if there is no size specified.

-- 
Ralf