Re: Probelm starting emacs snapshot - "Font `lucidasanstypewriter-10' is not defined"

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 20.06.2012 um 11:49 schrieb Rainer M Krug:

> My question is: why does emacs-snapshot need lucida, and emacs 23 not? Or did 
> it just ignore the
> missing font? And: How can I install the font on Ubuntu Precise?

GNU Emacs never needs a particular font. It can work (display) with whatever it 
finds on the system. And if it does not find anything suitable, then it uses 
empty boxes. It is possible that the different "releases" were differently 
packaged and therefore used different init files, maybe also different X 
resources. If this is not documented, then you can check the contents of the 
packages and answer your questions (I can't, because I don't use Ubuntu at the 
moment and I don't want to install it in the near future in a virtual instance.)

Before you install anything you should remember that you have two services that 
provide fonts for X clients: on the X server side you have the old system that 
used 'xset fp ...' and xlsfonts/xfontsel/xfd and font names in the XLFD (X11 
Logical Font Description) format, and on the "user side" you have libfontconfig 
with fc-cache/fc-match/fc-list and configuration files like (/etc/)fonts.conf 
or ~/.fonts.conf.

When your GNU Emacs executable uses libfontconfig you can use libfontconfig 
names to name the font(s) you want to use. When your GNU Emacs executable uses 
libotf you can even use OTF fonts.

In any case you have to set up your font services accordingly. I take my Lucida 
Sans Typewriter fonts off Java. Off your TeX installation you can use for 
example Latin Modern Mono, as found in files named lmmono*.otf. (I use them in 
the NS/NextSTEP/Cocoa variant of GNU Emacs.) There is also UM Typewriter, 
UMTypewriter-*.otf.

--
Mit friedvollen Grüßen

  Pete

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking 
about.
                                – John von Neumann