Re: Suggest installing more fonts?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2020 08:23:22 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > I doubt it's as few as 30, assuming we want to cover every living
> > script and some popular dead ones.
> 
> I don't think we do, really.  Listing the major fonts in a help text
> like this would be sufficient.

Then I really don't understand the goal here, because I think the
problems people report are never about "the major fonts" or the
"usual" scripts -- those are well covered by our default fontset.

Do you have any evidence that we have such fundamental problems with
our fontset setup?  If so, can you point me to the relevant reports
and discussions?

> >> Popping up a warning buffer (at the first time tofu is displayed per
> >> session) may be OK
> >
> > That's not doable, because you cannot pop up anything in the middle of
> > redisplay.  We could perhaps use the delayed-warnings mechanism, but
> > is that sufficient?
> 
> I think so.

Before we implement something like that, we should be reasonably
certain it will not annoy most users (not only power users).  It is
entirely legitimate to leave some of the Unicode blocks uncovered by
the fonts you have installed, and having Emacs display warnings about
that might be annoying.  OTOH, such a feature must be turned on by
default, otherwise it will not do its job.  So knowing whether users
will welcome this is important, IMO.

> >> Or...  adding help echo text props to tofu?
> >
> > To each one of them?
> 
> That's probably overkill.  Say, the first 100 of those in a buffer?
> Only the first?

It cannot be the first in a buffer, it should be in the window,
because otherwise it might not be visible.