emacs "Change buffer font" dialog does not include "fixed" as an option

[Peter Maydell]

Binary package hint: emacs23

Package: emacs23
Version: 23.1+1-4ubuntu7
Ubuntu release: 10.10

Start emacs. Shift-left-click on the buffer area to bring up the context menu. Select "Change Buffer Font...". The list of fonts in the dialog box does not include the X standard "fixed" font.

Also, if you start emacs with "emacs -fn fixed" this does not in fact start with the "fixed" font. Instead you get the same default font that you get if you don't specify '-fn fixed'.

This used to work in earlier versions of emacs. Indeed it still does so in the emacs22 package (version 22.2-0ubuntu9) that ships in 10.10.

[Peter Maydell (pmaydell)]

I have discovered a workaround for this bug. First you need to edit fontconfig's config files to stop it from filtering out all the monospace bitmap fonts, for example by replacing /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf with the attached file and then running "
sudo fc-cache -v -f" to rebuild its cache. Then the Fixed fonts appear in the dialog box but selecting them doesn't have any effect.
However you can now run emacs with "emacs -fn 'fixed-*-semicondensed-*'.

This ought to all just work out of the box, though, like it does in emacs 22.