Re: Suggest installing more fonts?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2020 13:09:58 +0000
> From: Gregory Heytings <ghe@sdf.org>
> cc: larsi@gnus.org, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > Let's keep the discussion in context, okay?  The context was the 
> > complaints that Emacs displays tofu where other applications display 
> > characters from installed fonts (which aren't GNU Unifont).  It is those 
> > use cases that I was talking about.  Where Emacs behaves no worse than 
> > other apps is in a different category.  More about that below.
> 
> That was not the meaning of Lars' message 24 hours ago:

That was not the only message in the thread.

> About the use cases you are talking about, I haven't seen cases where 
> "Emacs displays tofu where other applications display characters from 
> installed fonts".  My experience is that Emacs behaves better than many 
> other applications in this respect (except for the particular case of 
> Emojis).

I invite you to read the various font- and fontset-related bug reports
we have, and also relevant posts on Reddit and elsewhere out there.

> > The Emoji problem was already analyzed and a solution is in the works 
> > which will not look anywhere like the above (setting up the fontset is 
> > not enough, btw).  Let's move on to problems for which we don't yet have 
> > a solution, okay?
> 
> I was not aware that you were working on a solution to the Emoji problem 

I'm not; Robert Pluim is.  See bug#44020.

> The meaning of my proposal was only to include it _in_ Emacs, in
> short, to use, when it exists, the Unifont glyph in
> produce_glyphless_glyph() instead of creating a tofu with a hexcode.

As I wrote, this is not easily done, as font installation is a
system-wide action, as the font needs to be known by the system-wide
utilities and libraries we use for font searching.

And I personally wouldn't do this for Unifont.  It's UGLY.

But we are repeating ourselves, so let's agree to disagree on this.