Inks, faces, and character styles in Symbolics Genera

Evidence profile and terminology

The selected profile is the licensed Open Genera 2.0 media's Genera 8.5 world and selected source tree. Source claims below come from the exact artifacts in the provenance table. Runtime claims apply only to world a8ee5e86…0672, observed through the isolated Xvfb harness on 2026-07-26. No licensed source or extracted font data is reproduced here.

The source structure does contain an extended-attributes slot, but its own merge routine says it does not handle that slot. This article therefore does not invent an underline, strikeout, weight-axis, or other extended-attribute protocol.

Character styles are semantic and interned

SYS2; CHARACTER-STYLES defines a permanent named structure with family, face, size, index, and extended-attributes slots. Styles are interned by the first three components. A 256-entry table assigns compact indices suitable for styled “fat” characters; index zero is the null style (NIL NIL NIL).

The initial vocabulary is:

Compatibility parsing canonicalizes :SANS-SERIF and :HELVETICA to :SWISS, and :SERIF and :TIMES-ROMAN to :DUTCH. Device mappings also use :CONDENSED-CAPS and :BOLD-CONDENSED-CAPS; the implementation can extend each component registry, so the initial lists are not a closed ontology.

An invalid component signals a typed condition. Its interactive recovery choices include using the value once, registering a new component, making the value valid, replacing the whole style, or continuing with an undefined style. Programmatic extension points are ADD-CHARACTER-STYLE-FAMILY, -FACE, and -SIZE.

Resolution to a real font

Each display or output device owns mappings from character set and character style to either:

• a concrete font;
• a (:FONT ...) indirection; or
• a (:STYLE ...) indirection that merges another semantic style and resolves recursively.

A wildcard size mapping may cover otherwise unmapped sizes. Character sets that do not carry styles fall back to (:FIX :ROMAN :NORMAL). Missing resolution signals NO-CHARACTER-STYLE-MAPPING; recovery can select a replacement style, undefined style, another font, or font substitution. Successful recovery is cached. Global and per-device invalidation ticks prevent stale caches after mapping changes.

The :DEVICE-FONT family is an explicit escape hatch: its face slot names a literal font and its size is :NORMAL or wildcard. CHARACTER-STYLE-FOR-DEVICE-FONT and font backtranslations bridge concrete fonts back to styles. Undefined styles map to a box-font stand-in rather than silently selecting an arbitrary ordinary face.

How applications carry styles

TV sheets have default, current, and merged character styles. The compatibility default font is FONTS:CPTFONT, while the semantic screen default is FIX.ROMAN.NORMAL. A sheet validates a new default against its device and updates line height and redisplay state. Its WITH-CHARACTER-STYLE operation merges a nested style with the current style and then the sheet default, validates outside the dynamic binding to avoid recursive error handling, and can preserve or rebind line height and baseline.

Dynamic Windows formatted output stores style with buffered output entries. WITH-CHARACTER-FAMILY, WITH-CHARACTER-FACE, WITH-CHARACTER-SIZE, and WITH-CHARACTER-STYLE provide nested semantic changes, and redisplay carries those styles back through reconstruction. Style is therefore content/display state, not merely a transient mutation of an X graphics context.

Representative source-defined uses include:

These are established uses in the selected source. They are not a claim that every application uses each style or that the table is an exhaustive inventory of every literal style form in all optional products.

Relationship to Emacs faces and themes

Genera has some of the mechanisms that an Emacs user would associate with faces, but it does not combine them into one equivalent global face/theme facility.

The closest correspondence is:

Thus a variable such as a Joshua heading style or a who-line documentation style is functionally close to a named semantic face role: application code refers to the role and a user or site can replace its character-style value. Pane and application defaults provide another level of indirection. But many applications instead embed literal styles, and the selected source shows no system-wide theme package that atomically remaps a common catalog of roles.

In particular, Genera's literal face field is narrower than “face” in modern Emacs terminology. It is the second member of (family, face, size), normally a font variant such as roman, bold, italic, bold-italic, or condensed. Changing that field does not itself change ink, background, border, stipple, or window decoration. A coordinated visual theme is possible through init-file and subsystem customization, but it is a collection of settings rather than one first-class theme definition in the selected Genera 8.5 evidence.

User customization

Change Style
├── B -> bold
├── I -> italic
├── P -> bold-italic
├── N -> null style
├── S -> smaller
├── L -> larger
├── Meta + dispatch character -> redefine that dispatch
├── Escape -> prompt for one full style
├── Space or Return -> reuse the previous/default choice
├── End -> null style
├── Help -> show the active dispatch table
└── Abort, Control-G, or Rubout -> cancel

Native graphics: colors, ALUs, and patterns

Dynamic Windows' native drawing state includes thickness, scaled thickness, end and joint shapes, dashing and phase, :ALU, :PATTERN, :STIPPLE, :TILE, :GRAY-LEVEL, :COLOR, and :OPAQUE. Defaults include the drawing ALU, an all-ones pattern, gray level 1, no explicit color, and opaque pattern behavior.

An array supplied as :PATTERN is normalized as a stipple; a color object is normalized as a color. With an opaque pattern, zero bits clear the destination. With a non-opaque pattern, zero bits leave it unchanged. This is raster operation semantics, not alpha compositing.

The selected source defines 37 active named stipples:

• density grays: 50%, 25%, 75%, 33%, HES, 12%, 10%, 9%, 8%, 7%, 6%, and 5.5%;
• directional marks: southeast/southwest dense, thin, and thick hatches, southeast and southwest rain, and alternate rain;
• linear patterns: tracks, horizontal/vertical dashes, and horizontal/vertical lines; and
• decorative/geometric patterns: bricks, half-bricks, double-bricks, tiles, hearts, small and large diamonds, parquet, weave8, weave8b, and filled diamonds.

The twelve gray masks, their exact #/. periods, computed densities, selection rules, customization paths, and source-established uses are cataloged separately in Gray patterns and stipples in Symbolics Genera.

A stipple records name, density, and X phase. Named registries support lookup, and gray selection chooses a nearest density. The broader pattern protocol includes basic, device, raster, raster-slice, and PostScript representations; simple bundles of drawing arguments; device-conditional patterns; two-color stipples; and contrasting-pattern selection. Color devices can choose contrasting named colors, while monochrome devices use gray-pattern logic.

Genera's standard color objects and RGB/IHS/YIQ facilities are documented with the interactive editor in Color systems and the Color Editor. That article also explains why CADR COLOR-INKS are a different, earlier indexed color-map mechanism.

CLIM inks are a separate compatibility layer

CLIM II defines portable foreground, background, and flipping inks; colors; opacity; patterns; composite designs; and contrasting inks. It also defines text styles with family, face, and size components. The Genera CLIM port maps those abstractions onto its native display and hardcopy facilities.

The source-visible DW-TO-CLIM converter makes the boundary concrete: Dynamic Windows default-character-style becomes a CLIM default-text-style, and WITH-CHARACTER-STYLE becomes WITH-TEXT-STYLE, with corresponding family, face, and size conversions. A converter would be unnecessary if the two APIs and object models were identical.

The selected media retain most Genera CLIM medium/design implementation as compiled VBin rather than readable source. Therefore the exact per-operation mapping from every CLIM composite design to Genera raster ALUs is a TODO, not an inferred identity. See CLIM II on Genera for the complete facility and port inventory.

Preservation and reconstruction implications

• Preserve semantic style indices and the interning/mapping tables, not only rendered glyph pixels. The same styled text can legitimately resolve differently on screen, Macintosh, and printer devices.
• Preserve file attributes together with styled character data. The default style is intentionally out of band.
• Do not turn relative sizes into point sizes without a selected compatibility profile; the source uses a finite named ladder with clamping.
• Keep the native raster drawing protocol separate from CLIM's design algebra.
• Preserve stipple dimensions, phase, density metadata, opaque behavior, ALU, and device selection. A PNG of one result is insufficient.
• Do not describe Genera as having a general vector-font renderer based on semantic family names. The inspected mappings resolve to device fonts, and the resident screen fonts recovered from this world are raster fonts.

Open questions

• Exercise every character-style presentation menu branch in the world, including a successful style change, device-font selection, invalid-component restarts, and the complete device-filtered menu.
• Load the optional Color Editor in an isolated, provenance-pinned local source service and capture one reviewed color/palette state; the base world had no registered color screen.
• Determine the exact compiled Genera CLIM medium mapping for composite, translucent, and patterned designs without publishing licensed code.
• Test round trips of styled files, Zmail messages, and printer overrides against controlled local fixtures.
• Inventory every optional product's added style-family registrations. The present survey covers the selected declared source tree but does not claim every separately licensed product.

Preservation record

The source path prefix is the licensed media's sys.sct/; paths below are portable artifact names, not repository links.

The runtime capture is an exact 1,545-byte, 1200-by-900 grayscale PNG with PNG SHA-256 e83d3cd7…cf09 and decoded-pixel SHA-256 67474be0…bf7e. Session ink-face-20260726, generation 1, recorded 18 action records with final action-log SHA-256 10ca9183…63d3. The base and private world hashes remained a8ee5e86…0672. Shutdown prompt and confirmation were observed and cleanup began, but the known VLM cleanup stall required bounded forced termination. The harness did not invoke Save World or create a host checkpoint; save_world_performed and guest_checkpoint_created remain unknown, and the unsaved session state was discarded.

Sources

• Symbolics, licensed Open Genera 2.0 / Genera 8.5 media, exact selected artifacts above; inspected locally 2026-07-26. No licensed source text or font data is reproduced.
• Symbolics, Genera Concepts, for the user-level relationship among fonts, character styles, streams, and Dynamic Windows; verified 2026-07-26.
• Symbolics, Editing and Mail, for supported style-editing workflows; verified 2026-07-26.
• Symbolics, Common Lisp Interface Manager, Release 2.0, for the portable CLIM ink/design model used only as a terminology cross-check; verified 2026-07-26.
• Museum companions: Color systems and the Color Editor, CLIM II on Genera, Dynamic Windows, and Zmacs keybindings.

Last verified: 2026-07-26.