Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: fontaine version 3.0.0

Fontaine allows the user to define detailed font configurations and set them on demand. For example, one can have a regular-editing preset and another for presentation-mode (these are arbitrary, user-defined symbols): the former uses small fonts which are optimised for writing, while the latter applies typefaces that are pleasant to read at comfortable point sizes.

Below are the release notes.

Version 3.0.0 on 2025-02-20

This version changes the underlying implementation of Fontaineā€™s font configuration presets. In principle, this should not have any effect on how users experience the package, though there are some important details that are different.

Fontaine is now a ā€œthemeā€

Fontaine has always modified typography-related faces, such as default, fixed-pitch, and variable-pitch, to apply the font family, height, and weight specified by the user. In the past, this was done in a way that could get overridden under certain conditions, such as by loading a theme after setting a Fontaine preset configuration.

By making Fontaine a theme, we guarantee that its settings are not undone. In practice, this means that users do not have to re-apply the current preset after loading a theme. The function fontaine-apply-current-preset is thus obsolete.

In Emacs, a ā€œthemeā€ is a bundle of configurations. Those typically cover colours (such as with my modus-themes), but a theme can focus on other settings as well. For example, the popular use-package is internally done as a theme (check the value of custom-known-themes).

Fontaine is a theme in the same way use-package is, meaning that it will (i) persist its effects, (ii) not show up in the custom-enabled-themes and so not be affected by something like (mapc #'disable-theme custom-enabled-themes), and (iii) not be an option among those presented by load-theme.

There are no known bugs, though please contact me if you encounter a scenario where Fontaine does not do the right thing. Thanks, in this regard, to Haruko and Emily Hyland for reporting a couple of bugs:

Fontaine no longer has frame-specific effects

In the past, users could apply a Fontaine preset to the current frame without affecting other frames. While this could be useful in certain situations, it was ultimately making the code more complex for marginal gains. As part of the transition to a theme, which is anyway global, I am removing everything related to frame-specific functionality.

Quality-of-life refinements

  • The fontaine-generic-face-families are used when necessary to guard against nil values. Those font families are symbolic references to whatever the operating system is configured to use (e.g. on Linux this is handled by fontconfig).

  • If Fontaine is instructed to load an invalid preset, it displays a warning and does nothing else. Before, it would produce an error, which could prevent Emacs from starting up normally if this were to happen at startup. A warning is enough to inform the user of what is happening.

  • Same principle as above when Emacs is not ran in a graphical interface. In text terminals, Fontaine cannot work because it is not possible to have different font families, styles, and heights, than those of the terminal (hence the backronym of FONTAINE ā€œFonts, Ornaments, and Neat Typography Are Irrelevant in Non-graphical Emacsā€). Thanks to Jorge Gomez for the patch in pull request 13: https://github.com/protesilaos/fontaine/pull/13. Further tweaks by me.

  • The fontaine-toggle-preset command will produce an error if it cannot find the preset it is supposed to switch to. The toggle is between the last two loaded presets, as done by the command fontaine-set-preset (the fontaine-mode takes care to persist the relevant history).

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