Subject: Getting italic fonts (was Re: fonts in Info mode)

From: Andrew Innes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 17:44:51 +0100

On Wed, 14 Aug 96 18:10:00 PDT, "George V. Reilly" <[email-masked]> said:
>
>I made this change on my system and noticed that Bold and Italics faces
>don't work with Lucida Console and Italic faces don't work with Courier
>New (but Bold ones do).
>
>Any plans to fix this?

To get italics with Courier New, see below.

Lucida Console doesn't appear to have explicitly designed bold or italic
variations though, because Emacs certainly does ask for the bold
variation at least.  I suspect the bold variation is not returned
because it is wider than the normal face.

>I dimly recall someone remarking in the past that the problem was that
>Bold and Italic faces don't necessarily have the same width as their
>Regular counterparts in Windows, but they do in X.  Can't you just
>override the lfWidth of the LOGFONT to force the Bold, Italic, and
>Bold-Italic variants to have the same width, or use a character cell
>grid which is as wide as the widest font?

Well, I suppose we could change the NT Emacs text output functions to
draw individual characters at the spacing of the bold-italic variation,
but for most fonts it would look wrong (each char would be 2-3 pixels
too wide, which is very noticeable).

The only font I know of where the italic and bold variations are the
same width as the normal face is Courier New.  The only (minor) glitch
is that the italic variations are, for some inexplicable reason, one
pixel deeper than the other variations, so the line spacing is increased
by one pixel when italics are enabled (see below).

Because the italic variation for most fonts is synthesized (and hence
the characters extend outside the bounding box for normal characters,
leaving flotsom on the screen when you scroll or move the cursor over
text), the generation of italic faces is disabled by default.

To enable it (ie. if you are using Courier New), add this line to your
.emacs:

  (setq win32-enable-italics t)

AndrewI