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Development Version: 4.5.1-beta (12 May 2003).
Stable Version: 3.4.2 (28 Mar 2002).
Requirements: Emacs-21.1, XEmacs-20.4, or higher.
Part of: XEmacs SUMO package, ProofGeneral
Contact: Please use menu entry Send Bug/Problem Report in submenu X-Symbol - Other Commands.
Licence: GNU General Public License.

Support for Emacs, and XEmacs on MS-Windows with the development version, only. Support for XEmacs on MS-Windows/native is limited due to missing fonts (support for Latin-1, Latin-5 and half the math symbols only, no super- and subscripts).

New fonts for X-Symbol are being worked on. For details, see the special web page for additional fonts.

Package formats

Platform independent: x-symbol-Version-pkg.tar.gz at SourceForge.net
x-symbol-OthVers-pkg.tar.gz (with a different versioning scheme) at the XEmacs package directory
Red Hat at SourceForge.net and FU Berlin (coming)
Debian: at Debian (currently outdated)
Extended Souce: x-symbol-Version-src.tar.gz at SourceForge.net (for developers and packagers)

Recommendation

Use the development version for XEmacs (where the status is "gamma"), too! Here are two reasons:

Recent Changes

Changes with Release 4.5-beta

Installation Instructions for XEmacs

  1. Uncompress & extract x-symbol-Version-pkg.tar.gz in directory ~/.xemacs/xemacs-packages/.
  2. Insert the following code into your Emacs init file (~/.emacs):
    (x-symbol-initialize)
  3. If you want to customize X-Symbol, use menu item X-Symbol - General Options - Browse Customization.

Installation Instructions for Emacs-21.1

The following sequence works for me:

  1. Uncompress & extract x-symbol-Version-pkg.tar.gz in some directory, mentioned as XSYMB below.
  2. Recompile the lisp files for Emacs by invoking the following command in directory XSYMB:
    make -f etc/x-symbol/Makefile.emacs
  3. Optionally: Remake the info file to use references to the Emacs manual, not XEmacs' one, by invoking the following commands in directory XSYMB/man/x-symbol:
    make EMACS=emacs -k info
    mv x-symbol.info ../../info/
  4. Optionally: Include an entry for X-Symbol into XSYMB/info/dir. See X-Symbol's manual, section "Installing Manual".
  5. In ~/.emacs, use (replacing XSYMB accordingly):
    (defvar x-symbol-root-directory (expand-file-name "XSYMB"))
    (defvar x-symbol-lisp-directory
            (expand-file-name "lisp/x-symbol" x-symbol-root-directory))
    (setq load-path (cons x-symbol-lisp-directory load-path))
    (setq x-symbol-data-directory
          (expand-file-name "etc/x-symbol" x-symbol-root-directory))
    (load (expand-file-name "auto-autoloads" x-symbol-lisp-directory))
    (or (fboundp 'custom-add-loads)
        (defun custom-add-loads (symbol list)
          (dolist (load list) (custom-add-load symbol load))))
    (load (expand-file-name "custom-load" x-symbol-lisp-directory))
    (x-symbol-initialize)
  6. Restart Emacs (or evaluate the code above).
  7. Check the characters by pressing C-= C-=. If they are not displayed correctly, set the font path in the shell before starting Emacs by (see the manual for details):
    xset fp+ XSYMB/etc/x-symbol/pcf/
Christoph Wedler, 12 May 2003