Just a confirmation: I am under the impression that with vim running in an xterm, you are limited to using whatever fonts have been defined as X resources and using a mouse Ctrl-<left-click> if you want to change to a different font on the fly. Naturally the font change would affect the entire display.
Likewise, I have seen some rather elegant color schemes where some :hi groups are highlighted not only by using a different colour but also switching to italic - charon.vim, eg. Coding "cterm=italic" in the .vim file does not appear to cause a vim syntax error but after taking a quick look at the xterm doc it seems that using an italicized font as a highlighting enhancement - as least in my setup - is not possible when running vim in non-gui mode. Am I correct assuming the above or am I missing anything? Thanks, cga