[gentoo-user] font missing

[John P. Burkett]

After doing "emerge --depclean" on an amd64 machine, I find that Emacs
no longer locates the font it previously used. The font I liked was
specified in my .emacs file with the line
(set-default-font "10x20").
Using the old .emacs file and doing "emacs --debug-init" now
produces an error message that starts as follows::

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Font `10x20' is not defined")
  modify-frame-parameters(#<frame emacs@microway 0xf41280> ((font .
"10x20")))
  set-default-font("10x20")
  eval-buffer(#<buffer  *load*> nil "/home/john/.emacs" nil t)  ;
Reading at buffer position 3345
  load-with-code-conversion("/home/john/.emacs" "/home/john/.emacs" t t)
  load("~/.emacs" t t)
  #[nil "

Doing "xlsfonts -l 10x20" at the Gentoo prompt elicits this response:
DIR  MIN  MAX EXIST DFLT PROP ASC DESC NAME
-->    0  255  some    0   23  15    5
-cronyx-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-koi8-r

Interpreting this as a translation of the nickname 10x20 into the long
name, I edited my .emacs file, replacing
(set-default-font "10x20")
with
(set-default-font
"-cronyx-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-koi8-r")

With that change done, emacs starts without any error message. However,
the font is not quite the same as the old one. The old font had no
serifs except on the letters i and l, where they avoid confusion with
the number 1.  The new font has serifs on most letters and, to my eye,
looks unnecessarily cluttered.

With emacs running, I tried holding down the shift key and clicking the
left mouse button. That as expected brought up a font menu. Selecting
"Misc 10x20" elicited the response "Font not found."

Comparing the font paths on the computer with the missing 10x20 font and
on a computer with no font problem, I see the paths starting with
/usr/share/fonts/misc are identical.

Nonetheless there is a difference in the results from doing "locate
10x20" on the two machines.  I can "locate" the following misc/10x20
fonts on the machine where Emacs works well but not on the machine where
Emacs does not work well:

/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-2.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-3.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-4.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-5.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-7.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-8.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-9.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-10.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-11.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-13.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-14.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-15.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-ISO8859-16.pcf.gz
/usr/share/fonts/misc/10x20-KOI8-R.pcf.gz

Suggestions for recovering the old "10x20" font would be appreciated.

-John

-- 
John P. Burkett
Department of Economics
University of Rhode Island
Kingston, RI 02881-0808
USA

phone [phone]