F.5 Specifying Fonts on Mac

It is rare that you need to specify a font name in Emacs; usually you specify face attributes instead. For example, you can use 14pt Courier by customizing the default face attributes for all frames:

     (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "courier" :height 140)

Alternatively, an interactive one is also available (see Face Customization).

But when you do need to specify a font name in Emacs on Mac, use a standard X font name:

     -maker-family-weight-slant-widthtype-style...
     ...-pixels-height-horiz-vert-spacing-width-charset

See Font X. Wildcards are supported as they are on X.

Native Apple fonts in Mac Roman encoding has maker name apple and charset mac-roman. For example 12-point Monaco can be specified by the name ‘-apple-monaco-*-12-*-mac-roman’. When using a particular size of scalable fonts, it must be specified in a format containing 14 ‘-’s like ‘-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--13-*-*-*-*-*-mac-roman’.

You can specify a mac-roman font for ASCII characters like

     (add-to-list
      'default-frame-alist
      '(font . "-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--13-*-*-*-*-*-mac-roman"))

but that does not extend to ISO-8859-1: specifying a mac-roman font for Latin-1 characters introduces wrong glyphs.

Native Apple Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Central European, Cyrillic, Symbol, and Dingbats fonts have charsets ‘big5-0’, ‘gb2312.1980-0’, ‘jisx0208.1983-sjis’ and ‘jisx0201.1976-0’, ‘ksc5601.1989-0’, ‘mac-centraleurroman’, ‘mac-cyrillic’, ‘mac-symbol’, and ‘mac-dingbats’, respectively.

Since Emacs as of the current version uses QuickDraw Text routines for drawing texts, only characters in the charsets listed above can be displayed with the OS-bundled fonts, even if other applications that use ATSUI or Cocoa can display variety of characters with them.

The use of create-fontset-from-fontset-spec (see Defining Fontsets) for defining fontsets often results in wrong ones especially when using only OS-bundled fonts. The recommended way is to create a fontset using create-fontset-from-mac-roman-font:

     (create-fontset-from-mac-roman-font
      "-apple-courier-medium-r-normal--13-*-*-*-*-*-mac-roman"
      nil "foo")

and then optionally specifying Chinese, Japanese, or Korean font families using set-fontset-font:

     (set-fontset-font "fontset-foo"
     		  'chinese-gb2312 '("song" . "gb2312.1980-0"))

Single-byte fonts converted from GNU fonts in BDF format, which are not in the Mac Roman encoding, have foundry, family, and character sets encoded in the names of their font suitcases. E.g., the font suitcase ‘ETL-Fixed-ISO8859-1’ contains fonts which can be referred to by the name ‘-ETL-fixed-*-iso8859-1’.

Emacs uses the QuickDraw text rendering by default. On Mac OS X 10.2 and later, it can be changed so that it uses the Quartz 2D text rendering (aka CG text rendering) by setting mac-allow-anti-aliasing to t. However, it is reported to sometimes leave some garbages.