Sketchy overview of the details:

- gcc-3.x is probably required to compile this release, g++-3.x, too, as it
  has been re-written in C++ (and a corresponding version of libstdc++).

- the options used in the ./reconf script should work. everything else
  might work and might be broken.

- wchar_t MUST be UNICODE or ISO-10646-1 on your system, or various things
  will break down. On GNU/Linux, this is true, on Solaris, this is true
  only for "@ucs" locales, but you should have plenty of them.

- rxvt will use unicode internally, but does input/output in the current
  locale. so to get a utf-8 terminal, use "LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 rxvt" or
  equivalent.

- you can specify a different locale to be used for your input method
  using the imLocale ressource or switch, e.g.:
  LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 rxvt -imlocale ja_JP.EUC-JP

- keyboard input is limited by the selected X locale.

- "-fn" commandline switch and *.font ressource accepts a comma
  seperated list of fontnames:

  x:9x15bold			a x11 font
  9x15bold			the same
  xft:Andale Mono		a xft font
  xft:Andale Mono:pixelsize=20

- the _first_ font in the list selects the cell width/height. All other
  fonts must be smaller or same sized, or they will be ignored or worse.
  xft fonts will automatically be rescaled, x11-fonts, too, if their
  size is not specified in the XLFD.

- the fonts will be tried in the order given when searching for a font
  to display a specific character. if you are e.g. mainly interested in
  japanese you might want to put a japanese font first to get the ascii
  characters in it. If you are mainly interested in a text terminal and
  only want to display other characters you should put a ascii/is8859 text
  font first (e.g. "9x15bold") and let rxvt sort it out.

- xft fonts require gobs of memory and generally are slow. try not to
  antialias them ("Font:antialias=false") when possible. Often looks
  better, too, as they then match other fonts in weight.

- src/defaultfont.C lists the fallback fonts that are tried when a
  character cannot be displayed with the current list of fonts.

- using bold fonts for the bold attribute is not supported by xft
  and will not be supported by rxvt-unicode, either, even for normal x11
  fonts.

- normal bold text will use reverse video unless the colorBD resource has
  been set. coloured text will use high-intensity colours for bold.

Marc <rxvt@plan9.de>