Emacs and bitstream fonts
April 10, 2007
I use emacs on Ubuntu heavily and naturally want a nice font to use. I chose to use the “bitstream vera sans mono” font. Well, easy does it: Options->Customize Emacs->Specific Face: “default”, and setting the value of “Font Family” to “bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono” and value of “Height” to “100″ gave me the nice font that I wanted. “Custom” created the settings for me:
(custom-set-faces
;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom — don’t edit or cut/paste it!
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
‘(default ((t (:inherit nil :stipple nil :background “gray12″ :foreground “green” :inverse-video nil :box nil :strike-through nil :overline nil :underline nil :slant normal :weight normal :height 117 :width normal :family “bitstream vera sans mono”)))))
I should mention that I am using the “color-scheme” package and using a nice looking color scheme. The color information probably comes from there.
But then I tried to create a new frame (C-x 5 2) and lo! the new frame had my old font. Reading the emacs faq gave the answer: I’d have to set the font again in the variable that determines the options for all new frames. So I set in my “~/.emacs”:
(setq default-frame-alist
‘((font . “-bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-normal–0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1″)))
and new frames would now have the specified font, which happens to be the same as the original. I wonder if it is a coincidence that the size of the font in new frames and initial matches, because I have not specified the height of the font in this variable.
This seems like a ugly way: why specify the font properties in two different places? So I commented out the face created by custom, and oops! new frames would have a background of white. So I had to undo the change and let the fonts be specified in two places. But at least the initial and new frames have the same good looking font.
February 9, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Thanks, this post helps me set up Emacs on Ubuntu 8.10 to have the nice Bitstream font!