Anti-aliasing for Xft fonts broken in emacs-snapshot in Intrepid

[Anna Glasgall]

Binary package hint: emacs-snapshot

Anti-aliasing for Xft fonts does not work in emacs-snapshot (version 1:20081013-1) in Ubuntu 8.10 ("Intrepid Ibex") When I launched Emacs with -fn "DejaVu Sans Mono-8" in Hardy, the font would be nicely antialiased and hinted and subpixel-smoothed and such; in Intrepid, it is not. If I downgrade emacs-snapshot to the Hardy snapshot (1:20080228-1ubuntu1), fonts look good again, but I'd much rather use a newer snapshot for obvious reasons.

[Paul Collins (pjdc)]

I have a similar problem with the 20081018 snapshot from emacs.orebokech.com for Debian sid. I think I read a discussion about this on emacs-devel, which I cannot locate right now, but the problem seems to stem from the font-backend frame parameter. If I do

M-: (set-frame-parameter nil 'font-backend '(xft x)) RET

and then select a font, e.g. with M-x set-frame-font, I get anti-aliasing.

[Anna Glasgall (aglasgall)]

Paul's workaround also works in the 20081018 snapshot from the PPA at https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-elisp/+archive

[Paul Collins (pjdc)]

I found the emacs-devel discussion I was thinking of. The value of font-backend was deliberately selected.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/99324

[Anna Glasgall (aglasgall)]

This is still a regression from hardy. People (like me, and, I dare suggest, most emacs users) using Xft fonts in Emacs will find them broken when they upgrade.

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

confirming bug, but the bugfix needs to be done upstream first.

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

Now I have to put (font-backend . "xft") into my default-frame-alist with a recent build from emacs CVS. That is, it complains about non-string values for this parameter

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

Apparently it also swallows "xft x"

[deeflex (hajderr)]

I tried this

xrdb -remove .Xresource / .Xdefaults

and got something that looked quite AA.

I remember I modified those files to get AA in Hardy.

(Not sure if it helps everyone)