Some questions from novice X11 user on ISC UNIX 386 (long)

[Martin Weitzel]

Im a UNIX user for a long time, but a novice to X11 (using it about
two weeks now). After making my first experiences I have some questions.

At first, here is my current equipment, in case it should matter:

	Display
	- Sigma Laserview b&w monitor system (1680 * 1200 pixels, ~120 dpi)

	Software:
	- ISC UNIX 386 Release 2.2
	- X11 Release 3 runtime&development system (Release 4 should be
	  delivered soon, if I believe what my dealer promises ...:-/)

Now my questions:

1) X11 and virtual screens

As it appears to me, X11 is not well integrated with virtual screens (VTs).
After starting the X-server and -clients on some VT, I can well switch away
from this VT, but switching back doesn't work (the particular VT is dead
then) and I have to kill and restart the server and clients.

Maybe I'm doing someything very basic wrong here, because I found that if
I start the server only (without any client), switching VTs work! So the
server seems to get it right, but why do the clients notice VT switching
at all? My understanding of X11 is that clients do *all* communication with
the user thru the server!

2) Standard Fonts

As you see from my hardware description, the resolution of my monitor
is much higher that 75 or 100 dpi, for which fonts are included in the
X11 package. Unfortunately this means that most of the fonts are not
very valuable for me, as they are too tiny.

I have to use 18 points from the 75dpi-font to get a character size which
is comfortable to read (a 18 point 75dpi font appears on my screen in
about the size of 11 points). So I have to change the default font for
all the X-clients I want to use.

As I understand the font-naming conventions are such that any decent
X-client will automatically adapt according to the resolution of the
display, but that would require that there are fonts available with the
appropriate resolution. Unfortunately, there are many more fonts delivered
for 75dpi than for 100dpi, which comes nearest to my display resolution.
(As the eye is sensitive to the filled area, not to extension in a single
direction, the 100dpi fonts would still appear too small by about 30%, but
that is of course much better than the 75dpi fonts).

What do other people with high resolution monitors? Where do they get
the appropriate fonts from? I thought X-11 is famous for its portability
to a broad range of hardware platforms. Does all this hardware have only
75dpi resolution monitors?

3) xterm and xpcterm

As you see from the above, ISC-s standard fonts with the AT-PC glyphs are
not much useful for me. That is not too worse, as I rather tend to use the
ISO-8859 character set (before I began using X11, I had setup appropriate
output-mapping). After getting the CHRCLASS- and xmodmap-stuff right,
normal text applications run satisfactory (well, at least I can reasonably
edit with vi).

Problems start when using Curses. IMHO, the terminfo entries are not so
`well integrated' and/or the respective X11 terminal emulators are
incomplete. Well, I know that blinking is a problem and that due to
using ISO-8859 fonts in xpcterm the semi grafic via the alternate
character set yield unexpected results and I will not complain about
this, but here are some other examples

	- in xpcterm, underlining note only underlines, but switches
	  also to reverse mode (note that xterm get's this right!)

	- for xterm, the terminfo entry specifies alternate character
	  set switching and a character map for semigraphic. Non of this
	  works correctly, so drawing boxes out of curses displays every
	  sort of strange characters.

Maybe there is some workaround for the latter by building appropriate fonts
myself (hey ISC, for what do I pay all that money if I must do many
adaptions myself!), but the documentation is very incomplete in that
areas. Part of ISC's documentation is the `X Window System User's Guide',
which lists in its appendix E the "xterm Control Sequences". For the ones
which load G0-G3 character sets, it is not documented which fonts they
really access. So, even if I manage to construct suitable character sets
that include glyphs for semigraphic, I nevertheless don't know how to
tell xterm to use them. (Note: I don't want to load these fonts as
standard fonts, but I want be able to switch to them from within xterm.)

OK, ~100 lines now, I think enough for today. Maybe someone on the net
has more info, solutions, or workarounds for all this. BTW: I'm not so
dissappointed from X11 as it might seem from parts of this article, but
naturaly I find it annoying that after spending my $$$$ (or rather DM :-))
for suitable equipment, I'm limited in some areas to much less than I
could do on my good ol' HGC console. Of course, this doesn't mean that
I'm blind wrt all the advantages of X11 ...
-- 
Martin Weitzel, email: martin at mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83