Re: Suggest installing more fonts?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2020 08:31:33 +0200
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> There's two philosophies here, depending on the "class" of the
> application.  The applications that are primarily concerned with
> displaying documents (Chrome, Firefox, Libreoffice) put a lot of work
> into this, and both have giant lists of fonts preinstalled, and are
> distributed with (some) fonts.
> 
> Other apps, that are more bare-bones (like Terminal) just look at the
> default font and then tufo if the font doesn't have that glyph.
> 
> Emacs is somewhere in the middle here, as usual.

A significant difference between Emacs and other apps is that Emacs
doesn't use fixed lists of fonts, but instead relies on system font
configurations to provide the fonts suitable for displaying some
character.  Thus, Emacs allows the users to install _any_ font that
supports a character, and get that displayed, even if the font is not
one of those known to the application in advance.  I believe this
makes Emacs more flexible and future-proof, but as usual, that power
comes with a price.

For that reason, I think it doesn't help too much to look at other
applications, because their philosophy in this department is very
different.  We should instead identify the issues Emacs users
encounter wrt fonts, and design and implement solutions for those
issues, whether by improving documentation or by enhancing our font
search and matching infrastructures.  For example, the issues with
Emoji are due to several fundamental issues we already identified (the
fact that Emoji belong to a large and very heterogeneous "script" we
call "symbol", for example) and are working on a solution.