Re: Bold colors

[Anton Monroe <akm meer net>]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 07:37:42PM +0300, Pavel Tsekov wrote:
> > The actual font of the characters is beyond MC's control; it uses
> > whatever font the terminal provides. But I think you are talking about
>
> That is not true. MC can turn on/off certain attributes of the screen -
> one of the being the bold attribute. The terminal would draw characters
> with the bold font instead of the normal one. Currently MC draws certain
> parts of the screen with the bold attribute turned on and this is not
> user configurable. A workaround would be to set the bold font of your
> terminal to a normal font  if it is possible.

I stand corrected. Though I think we were mostly saying the same thing.

It's off topic, but would someone be willing to educate me?
In printing, 'font' refers only to size; the style is called the
'typeface'.  So you might have a Roman typeface in a 10-point font.  A
bold Roman typeface is in the same style but drawn with thicker lines.
On a computer 'font' describes both the style and size. I suspect
someone adopted the printers' term without quite understanding what it
meant.  Typographers complain about this misuse of their word, but they
might as well get used to it. 

I use a simple terminal and I think of the terminal's bold attribute as
being a color.  Color isn't an attribute of a font, so I thought Caj was
probably confusing 'bold font' with 'bright color'.  Either that or the
meaning of 'font' has been changed again.

But I =think= what Pavel is saying is that some terminals (xterm or
whatever Caj is using?) interpret the screen's bold attribute as an
instruction to actually use a thicker font. That is, the screen
attribute that Terminfo calls 'bold' is a high-level concept that is
translated by each terminal into something that the terminal can
provide, like a brighter white, a different color, or a thicker font. In
that case MC cannot itself change a font, but it does set a flag that
can sometimes result in a terminal using a different font.  Have I got
it right or am I still confused?

Anton