The "foreback" face property at workHere's another new face property in XEmacs. This one is probably not going to be used ever, but still it fixes one particular problem. Until now, XEmacs used the background and foreground colors to display a face background bitmap (as opposed to a regular pixmap). This basically rendered the text unreadable.

The new face property is called "foreback" (I'm running short of sensible property names these days). It's the "foreground of the background" if you will. When a face has a background bitmap, it uses the regular background color for bitmap's background, but the foreback color for the bitmap's foreground. See the attached screenshot for a concrete example of the problem it fixes.

The bitmap I used for this example is X11's xsnow bitmap. Nice Christmas XEmacs screenshot, isn't it? :-)

In order to set a face's foreback color, either use the Custom interface, or the set-face-foreback function.