Emacs: fontaine version 2.1.0

2024-09-02

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.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): fontaine
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/fontaine
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/fontaine-changelog
• Git repositories:
  • GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/fontaine
  • GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/fontaine
• Backronym: Fonts, Ornaments, and Neat Typography Are Irrelevant in Non-graphical Emacs.

Below are the release notes.

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Version 2.1.0 on 2024-09-02

Fontaine is in a stable state and I find it very useful every day. This release includes some small quality-of-life improvements.

Use the fontaine-toggle-preset command

It will switch between the last preset and the one you are currently using. If it cannot find an older preset, it will prompt for one using minibuffer completion.

Presets are set with the fontaine-set-preset command, either interactively or from Lisp (e.g. in the init.el file).

Internally, fontaine-toggle-preset takes care to only switch between existing presets, so old preset names (such as from the time of some experiment) will be skipped if they are not part of the current value of fontaine-presets.

All entries in the fontaine-presets accept and optional width attribute

This is for users who need to set an explicit width value to the underlying face they are targeting. This, of course, depends on the capabilities of the font family that is used. Those that do not support varying widths will have no effect.

The width attribute for all existing entries is composed by the name of the face plus the -width suffix, such as :fixed-pitch-width. Check the Fontaine manual for a complete example.

Thanks to Adam Porter for making the suggestion to cover the width attribute in issue 6: https://github.com/protesilaos/fontaine/issues/6.

The fontaine-presets can look very long if all values are set, as we cover all typography-related faces and all their attributes. But do not let this intimidate you. Your configuration can be short and still highly usable. For example:

(setq fontaine-presets
      '((coding ; get the fallback values and override the `:default-height'
         :default-height 120)
        (reading  ; change more stuff from the fallback values
         :default-height 140
         :default-family "Fira Sans"
         :fixed-pitch-family "Fira Mono"
         :variable-pitch-family "Merriweather")
        (presentation
         :inherit reading ; copy the attributes of `reading', then override the `:default-height'
         :default-height 220)
        (t ; everything falls back to this
         :default-family "Iosevka Comfy"
         :default-height 100
         :fixed-pitch-family "Iosevka Comfy Motion"
         :variable-pitch-family "Iosevka Comfy Duo")))

With these, you can switch between coding, reading, and presentation to match your evolving workflow requirements.

These allow you to switch between not only different font families, but also font combinations to match a certain style, with higher or lower heights, and so on.

The fontaine-set-preset prompt only uses relevant default presets

When you invoke the command fontaine-set-preset it tries to find a previous preset to set it as the default minibuffer value. This means that if you press RET without selecting anything, the default will be used (check with your minibuffer package in case this does not happen, or contact me if you need help).

Before, the default value was the last selected preset. This could be out-of-date though if the fontaine-presets were rewritten in the meantime. Now we take care to only produce a default value that is among those specified in the fontaine-presets.