Re: Info faces

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Mon, 30 Oct 2000, Miles Bader wrote:

> The problem is that `inverse-video' does not work correctly on ttys, or
> at least not as you might expect [and never has, to the best of my
> knowledge].  It makes *explicitly drawn* text reverse-video, but blank
> areas that are `implicitly drawn', e.g., by clearing the screen, or
> clearing to the end-of-line, do not (on most terminals) get the same
> attributes as explicitly drawn text, and just show up in the terminal's
> default background color (usually black).

I guess we could change the relevant functions on term.c to draw spaces 
instead of using the clear-FOO primitives, if user has defined 
non-default bg color or -rv.  This will be a bit slower, but on a console 
and on xterm it will be hardly noticed (and we could always document that 
using colors slows down the display somewhat).

FWIW, the MS-DOS port actually draws spaces to clear portions of display, 
and that's why it all works correctly there, for a long time.  Of course, 
``drawing spaces'' is implemented by blitting a buffer to the video 
memory, but that's what modern bit-mapped displays will do, too, right?

Gerd, does this sound like a change that's localized enough to try it 
now?

> unless the redisplay code is changed to explicitly draw spaces
> everywhere there's a non-black background, I'm not sure having `-bg' or
> `-rv' options makes sense on ttys...

Look at them as an investment for future development ;-).  -fg works 
right now, so it didn't make sense to not implement the other two, since 
they share the same code.