Allan Duncan <amd2345@fastmail.com.au> writes:

Without starting an editor war [ :-) ], I'd like some help in getting xemacs to play ball.

Do you actually want XEmacs, or do you want a GUI emacs? Because the "X" in "XEmacs" is short for "Lucid", not "X11". GNU Emacs' mindshare is a lot bigger than XEmacs' mindshare. I don't support XEmacs, but I'll have some educated guesses below.

I'd like to give xemacs a try, but I can't get it to recognise the font I want to use (dejavu sans mono) doesn't appear in the "available" list.

Liberation mono does, however.

Available inside Xemacs' builtin dialog of some sort? This works in GNU Emacs: (if (not (memq 'xft (frame-parameter nil 'font-backend))) (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Terminus") (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "DejaVu Sans Mono") (set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "DejaVu Sans")) If you can guarantee a modern build, you can omit the left branch: (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "DejaVu Sans Mono") (set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "DejaVu Sans")

Here are their entries in their font.scale files: LiberationMono-Regular.ttf -misc-liberation mono-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1 DejaVuSansMono.ttf -misc-dejavu sans mono-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1

You should be using fc-list & fc-match for diagnostics.

Btw, there is a message "Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion"

fontsets are ancient X font system things that you shouldn't need to care about if you're using xft/fontconfig. PS: I'm assuming XEmacs speaks xft & fontconfig these days; if it's still using the X font system, I have NFI.