On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 11:18 +0100, Gérard Milmeister wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 21:16 -0500, Alex Viskovatoff wrote:
> > Gérard,
> >
> > Using the current CVS snapshot of Emacs fixes the meta key problem with
> > the new xorg-X11 release for me, too.
> >
> > Incidentally, when compiling Emacs, I used the gtk x-toolkit option,
> > instead of the default Xaw3d option the Fedora Emacs package uses. I
> > don't know why Fedora doesn't use the gtk option, given that gtk2 is
> > more or less standard on Red Hat systems, and it looks better than
> > Xaw3d.
> >
> Yeah, however I think gtk2 support is mainly in CVS. I am waiting for
> full pango support in Emacs and XEmacs.
The GTK2 support is indeed only in Emacs CVS, and is still regarded as
experimental -- there are some problems with the scrollbars apparently.
If you do compile CVS Emacs with GTK2 support, note that Pango and
XFT/Fontconfig are only used for the menus and other parts of Emacs
drawn with GTK2. Pango (and hence XFT/Fontconfig) will NOT be used for
Emacs' buffers themselves (i.e. the text you are editing). There is an
even more experimental patch available to make Emacs use XFT/Fontconfig,
and therefore be able to use anti-aliased true type fonts but apparently
it is highly alpha. I once asked the Emacs developers why they didn't
use Pango, and instead were implementing their own way of displaying
utf-8 and rtl text, etc., and was told that they did seriously consider
it and evaluated it and apparently it could not do all the kinds of
complex things like overlays that they need Emacs' display engine to do.
Of course whether GTK2 and XFT/Fontconfig support is ready for prime-
time or not, I cannot understand why there hasn't been a new release of
Emacs in something like 2 years. I think Emacs has a lot of good
developers working on it but no one with really strong project
management skills.
Best, Darren
--
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D. D. Brierton darren@xxxxxxxxxxx www.dzr-web.com
Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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