Re: Fonts (Was: CVS commit: xsrc/external/mit)

[Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Sun, May 08, 2022 at 10:29:48 +0000, nia wrote:

> On Sun, May 08, 2022 at 01:26:21PM +0300, Valery Ushakov wrote:
> > Why kill bold/italic formatting that is very useful for visual
> > presentation?  As an aside, why *VT100.allowBoldFonts: false?  Is that
> > b/c spleen has no bold/italic versions?  That makes it unsuitable as
> > the default font IMO.
> 
> It does not, the main reason we want spleen is because it has
> versions for high-DPI displays, which is very rare for X bitmap
> fonts.

I would guess someone with a high-DPI display is very likely to want
to use scaleable fonts and a more modern desktop environment, so Xt
resources will not apply to them anyway :)

Most of my netbsd machines are remote or serial-only and so I *very*
rarely run an X server on NetBSD. I would very much prefer that out of
the box defaults for the base X (startx on a system without packages)
were more or less comfortable (I know how to configure it, I don't
want to configure it e.g. in a random throw-away test VM).  No bold
font in xterm makes it not very comfortable - as you get older and
your eyesight deteriorates you start to appreciate extra visual cues
to help you see things, like bold in man pages, emacs font-lock, etc.

I think that using hight-DPI as the argument to select spleen as the
default font sacrificing bold/italic is a catering to the wrong target
audience that is 1) small 2) is very unlikely to stick to that default
choice anyway.

-uwe