outdated url-library: is XEmacs still the next generation of Emacs?

[Jeff Sparkes]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> No, those properties are part of the font instance, which is a
> subobject within a face.  We don't really need that stuff in the menus
> to do a release, anyway; people who really want to do it can use
> #'set-face-font.  But currently most of the time you can't even change
> the size or family of the default face with the options menu, and its
> not obvious how to accomplish those things in Custom.
>
> A better idea might be to ditch the current face structure entirely,
> and use fontconfig structures to hold face information.  But (as I
> wrote to Aidan about other ideas) IMO this is not a lid we want to
> lift *if* we're thinking about a stable release in the near future
> (ie, in less than a year).
>
>  > Gtk fonts are similar, especially if we do use the Pango Xft
>  > backend.  Cairo gives us more portability, but I don't yet know
>  > what that implies for fonts.
>
> In all of the above (plus raw Xft), AIUI font naming is based on the
> fontconfig library.  (It's only GNOME/gconf that boofs the pooch here,
> I believe.)  As far as I can see, any work we do to support Xft fonts
> in the menus and Customize will be useful in supporting any or all of
> the above.

Pango can use Xft to render, and I believe fontconfig as well.
Which is a good thing for unifying configuration.We should be able to
pass the same string to different backends and get the same(ish) fonts.

>
> Also, I think you misunderstand what Cairo is/does.  Cairo is a
> graphics library, not a GUI toolkit.  I doubt that it gives more
> portability than GTK, which is available for *nix, Mac, and Windows.
> It would give more powerful primitives to write out own redisplay,
> though.  Also, GTK2 is moving to a Cairo-based implementation AIUI,
> and there is an SVG library (libsvg) based on Cairo.

I didn't mean to imply that I would use Cairo instad of Gtk. Cairo
rendering is how Gtk runs on windows, AIUI.  I'd have to use
Cairo instead of Gdk to render that non-font parts of the Gtk port.
The widgets already use it, so its only drawing of the cursor and
maybe borders that would have to change.

Gtk uses Cairo quartz for the Mac I believe.  Cairo also supports SDL,
which smaller or embedded devices may use, and maybe DirectFB would be
useful for somebody.  Most of the other devices listed a
cairographics.org probably aren't useful.