On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 06:05:58PM +0200, Giovanni Pensa wrote:
> a nice and free (as in free tibet) alternative is Bitstream Vera Sans,
> less nice without antialias (not really supported by *Emacs) but with
> a monospaced version (Vera Sans Mono).
Actually I disagree about the "less nice without antialias" -- all the
bitstream vera fonts have _incredible_ hinting, to the point where they look
quite excellent without antialiasing even at typical small sizes. The MS
fonts also have excellent hinting, but the vera fonts are if anything,
better.
However there is a fairly significant problem with Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
in emacs -- the font spacing is less that the nominal bounding box emacs uses
for the font[*], and this causes emacs to perform much more redrawing that it
needs too, because it thinks (usually incorrectly) that there is overlap
between the characters.
It's a shame because these are reasonably attractive fonts, the incrible
hinting makes them more usable that most for standard display, and they're
really free (as in tibet :-).
[*] It's been a while since I looked at this problem; I seem to recall
thinking at the time that a fairly minor tweak to the redisplay could
solve it, e.g., have emacs forcibly increase the line-spacing to the
point where it didn't overlap, but Gerd disagreed.
-Miles
--
`The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement'
