Re: [h-e-w] Visiting hello file is making Emacs non-responsive

[Tomas Nordin]

Hi Eli

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Tomas Nordin <address@hidden>
>> Date: Sat, 08 Jun 2019 02:04:03 +0200
>> 
>> I have just installed 26.2 on the work computer I have. I also have
>> 26.1. I just today discovered that visiting the hello file, `C-h h`,
>> make Emacs really non-responsive. I am guessing it is some sort of font
>> problem. What is a good advice to get around that if any?
>
> If you wait long enough, Emacs should eventually display the HELLO
> file and become responsive again.  Does that happen?  If not, how long
> have you waited for it?

It takes 38 seconds. After that, other buffers are responsive and the
HELLO buffer stay semi-responsive let's say. From the top and walking
down some two lines a second with C-n goes OK until is start to stumble
on this line first

    East Asia: 你好, 早晨, こんにちは, 안녕하세요

and some other lines.

> If HELLO eventually does get displayed, look for the characters with
> no fonts -- they are displayed as boxes with hex code.  Install fonts
> that cover those characters, and the problem should go away.  With
> Emacs 26.2, I suggest to install Symbola if you don't have it already.

I couldn't find characters not displayed like that (boxes with hex
code). By installing Symbola I took it to mean go to
https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/symbola, download the zip, copy the
Symbola.ttf file to the windows/fonts directory. Then put a proper
configuration in the init file, like

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
 '(font . "DejaVu Sans Mono-10"))

adjusted for Symbola. But I don't know how to specify it. (I tried with
just "Symbola" and that gave me something non-monospaced).

> If you waited for, say, several minutes, and HELLO is still not
> displayed, start by trying this in "emacs -Q".  If the problem goes
> away in "emacs -Q", some of your customizations are responsible, and
> you should find them either by reviewing your init files or by
> bisecting them.

Experimenting with emacs -Q only.

> It is also possible that you have an awful lot of fonts installed on
> that system, way more than on an average Windows system out of the
> box.  On my systems "C-h h" takes between 10 and 20 sec, depending on
> the OS version and the fonts I have installed, but I only installed
> maybe a dozen or so beyond what came with the OS.

That fonts folder showed something like 192 items. I don't know if its
relevant but (length (x-list-fonts "*")) returned 1988. Also I forgot to
say that the computer has windows 10.

Best regards
--
Tomas