X weirdness under 3.1.5

[Robert Brazile]

Am I the only one for whom fonts don't work correctly? I have a 6000
with both an 8-bit color card and a 24-bit color card. When running
the 3003 X server on the 8-bit card, I could not use any application
that used fixed-width fonts (such as Courier). They would display each
character as if the server and the application had different ideas about
the height of the character, so for "a" I would see all of an "a" and part
of a "b" (obviously getting the next character in the font). This
tended to make things unreadable.

When I switched to the 24-bit card, things worked more-or-less
properly, and I was able to run (gnu) emacs and other programs I need
to do my work. The server on the 24-bit card had other problems, but
nothing I couldn't live with.

I had hopes that with 3005, these bugs would be fixed. Well, the
problem persists with the server running on the 8-bit card, and now
the 24-bit version is broken! Not as bad, mind you, but I can no
longer see underscores in the Courier fonts. This makes looking at C
source a real adventure.

It may be a library-server disagreement, as clients distributed with
the system don't seem to have the same problem. I'm just a little
puzzled as to why I don't anyone else mentioning this difficulty.

While I'm here, does anyone know how to get aixterm to stop turning my
Delete keysyms into "ESC [ P"s? I've tried mucking with the
translation tables to no effect; perhaps I'm doing it wrong. It was
working fine (Delete == ASCII DEL) with 3003, it's just now broken in
3005.

One last comment: I *really* wish (X-based) info wouldn't call xrdb
WITHOUT the -merge flag. I get tired of all of my Xdefaults
disappearing just because I had to look at a man page.

Robert Brazile
Bolt Beranek and Newman
brazile at diamond.bbn.com