Re: MULE shows gibberish; now what?

[Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>]

>> Or does this Emacs come from some RPM or some other such package where
>> the packagers might have changed the default ?
> How would I find it?

The one who installed it should know.  But if you can't ask him or if he
doesn't know, then...

>> > Font or fontset: -misc-fixed-bold-*-*-*-*-140-75-75-*-*-*-1
>> This is odd.  Maybe the other poster (can't remember who it was)
> Hmm, do not remember seeing this message...
>> was right: your Xserver has a weird font setup with an alias
>> from <godknowswhat>-iso8859-5
>> to -Cronyx-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-90-RAWIN-R.
>> Can you try to look for RAWIN in the output of something like
>> xlsfonts -ll -fn '*-iso8859-5'
> OK, *this* I can do remotely.  ;-)  Done:
> name:  -cronyx-courier-bold-o-normal--10-100-75-75-m-60-iso8859-5
[...]
>       FONT                  
> -Cronyx-Courier-Bold-O-Normal--10-100-75-75-M-60-RAWIN-R

So that's indeed the problem.  What kind of system is that ?
Solaris ?  GNU/Linux ?  Which distribution ?  Mandrake ?  Debian ?
It would be good if you could figure out where the alias for the fontname
comes from, so we can try and make sure it won't happen again.

> Etc.  A lot of them...  In fact there are 3 fonts which have
> CHARSET_REGISTRY ISO8859, they have FOUNDRY ETL.  How do I convince
> emacs to use them in preference to FOUNDRY Cronyx ones?

I don't know enough about fontsets to figure that out.  Emacs should
have better ways to specify preferences in the choice of fonts when
several "seemingly equivalent" fonts are found.  But nobody has bothered
to write the code yet.

> BTW, why -etl-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso8859-5 is
> not prefered to the other guy automatically?  What are the criteria?

I think there's no criteria for this.  It does sort the matching fonts
according to some criteria, but it only considers the size/boldness/...
to decide which is the closest match.  The handling of `family' and
`foundry' could use some improvement.

> What can a sysadm do to fix this misconfiguration of thinking that
> rawin-r is iso8859-5 (if it is one)?

Yes, it is a misconfiguration since the two encodings are not the same.
A sysadmin can just look at the /some/where/fonts.aliases file and
remove the bogus alias.


        Stefan