Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!ncar!boulder!stan!garya
From: garya@stan.com (Gary Aitken)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re default font id
Message-ID: <291@stan.com>
Date: 12 Dec 88 16:39:50 GMT
Organization: Solbourne Computer Inc., Longmont, Co.
Lines: 39


    No-one should ever do anything with the default font. ...You certainly
    cannot display any characters with it, since you cannot predict the 
    encoding it uses.

    Note that not even my Hello World program ... tried to use the default
    font.

That's wonderful.  But note that uwm, xterm, and a few other "real" clients
DO use the default font.  Also note that the R3 Xt stuff occasionally reaches
into GC's to get the default font.

    The only reason it exists is to prevent there being a "No-font-selected"
    error.

Is this really so?  I would have thought the reason for a default font was
to allow at least some level of functionality when the standard font library
or a requested font was unavailable.  In particular, it should be possible
to run applications from a server when the standard font library, possibly
located on a remote file system, is unavailable because the network is down.

    I'm willing to bet that your code assumes that the encoding for the 
    default font is ISO Latin-1.

In the sense that error messages are currently written in English and not
obtained from a language translation mechanism, yes.  They should work just
fine otherwise.

    Therefore, the concept of "the" default font does not exist.

Fine.  All most applications care about is "a" default font, and as long as
it works reliably, it's sufficient.

The above remarks bring up some items which I think need clarification.
What IS the purpose of the default font?  What operations are considered
valid for it?  I may have made some incorrect assumptions.  If so, then a
lot of other "example" code does also, such as uwm and xterm, and I would
suggest we get them "in proper form", as they are probably being used as
models by a lot of different people.