5.13 Font configurations for Org and others

The themes are designed to optionally cope well with mixed font configurations. This mostly concerns org-mode and markdown-mode, though expect to find it elsewhere like in Info-mode.

Option for font mixing.

In practice it means that the user can safely opt for a more prose-friendly proportionately spaced typeface as their default, while spacing-sensitive elements like tables and inline code always use a monospaced font, by inheriting from the fixed-pitch face.

Users can try the built-in M-x variable-pitch-mode to see the effect in action.

To make everything use your desired font families, you need to configure the variable-pitch (proportional spacing) and fixed-pitch (monospaced) faces respectively. It may also be convenient to set your main typeface by configuring the default face the same way.

[ The ‘fontaine’ package on GNU ELPA (by the author of the modus-themes) is designed to handle this case. ]

Put something like this in your initialization file (also consider reading the doc string of set-face-attribute):

;; Main typeface
(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "DejaVu Sans Mono" :height 110)

;; Proportionately spaced typeface
(set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "DejaVu Serif" :height 1.0)

;; Monospaced typeface
(set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family "DejaVu Sans Mono" :height 1.5)

Or employ the face-attribute function to read an existing value, such as if you want to make fixed-pitch use the font family of the default face:

(set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family (face-attribute 'default :family))

The next section shows how to make those work in a more elaborate setup that is robust to changes between the Modus themes.

Configure bold and italic faces.

Note the differences in the :height property. The default face must specify an absolute value, which is the point size × 10. So if you want to use a font at point size ‘11’, you set the height to ‘110’.¹ Whereas every other face must either not specify a height or have a value that is relative to the default, represented as a floating point. If you use an integer, then that means an absolute height. This is of paramount importance: it ensures that all fonts can scale gracefully when using something like the text-scale-adjust command which only operates on the base font size (i.e. the default face’s absolute height).

Note for EWW and Elfeed fonts.