Re: How can I determine what the default font it?

[Floyd L. Davidson]

Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> wrote:
>floyd@barrow.com (Floyd L. Davidson) writes:
>
>> jasonr (Jason Rumney) @  f2s.com wrote:
>>>floyd@barrow.com (Floyd L. Davidson) writes:
>>>
>>>Then set your dpi correctly, so X can compensate. Since 21.1, Emacs
>>>default fonts are specified in point sizes rather than pixel sizes.
>>
>> Can you be less cryptic?

Perhaps I was too cryptic too!

I was asking about how it related to the article it referenced.
Neither you or Jason have helped the OP to configure his Emacs,
and I believe that was the intention of my article.

>Different monitors/displays show a pixel in different sizes.  Pixel
>size is usually measured in pixels per inch, or dots per inch, aka
>DPI.

DPI is screen resolution.  It is a function of the X server's
configured scan rate (vertical in this case, though usually what
is referenced is only the horizontal) and the physical size of
the monitor's viewable screen.

>The X server has a configuration option (in /etc/X11/XF86Config, I
>believe) where you can tell it about the dpi of your monitor/display.

Actually, you don't tell it "about" it, you flat force it to a
specific resolution by setting the scan rate (rather than DPI,
which is a derived value which also depends on the monitor size,
a characteristic that the X server does not know about and does
not care about, and hence is not part of the X configuration and
is only a number you might just happen to know, though it is
useless information for the most part).

Jason can't seriously be suggesting that the answer to Emacs
font configuration is "Then set your dpi correctly"???  Surely
what he meant wasn't quite what he said.

>Emacs used to specify font sizes in pixel, so regardless of what dpi
>you specified in X11, the standard font was N pixels tall.

How does that relate to the article to which Jason was replying?
What that article listed was .Xdefault settings such as this:

 Emacs.default.attributeFont:    -*-courier-*-*-*-*-23-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1

What would you suggest changing in that specification?  Which,
incidentally, works quite well... as near as I can tell.  Is
there some benefit to a different manner of specification?

>But now, Emacs specifies font sizes in point (1/72th of an inch), so
>the number of pixels of the default font size depends on the dpi
>setting.  Let's say you specify a 12pt font, then that's 1/6 inches.
>If you have 6 dpi, then Emacs will choose 1 pixel to display it.  If
>you have 60 dpi, then Emacs will choose 10 pixels to display it.
>
>This method works for many applications.

How does that relate to the topic at hand?  Please provide an
example demonstrating something other than what I've previously
posted that will work better.

Otherwise, rather than describe well known characterstics of
point size, why don't we discuss the less known little objects
like em's and en's, which are also relative and can't be
measured in specific numbers of pt's.

--
Floyd L. Davidson           <http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)                         floyd@barrow.com