Re: debian emacs 22.2.1 why do greek and hebrew fonts display normally with -nw and not in an xwindow

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:44:05 -0800 (PST), shul <meshulum@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi I have an utf8 encoded file with some greek characters and it looks
> like "square boxes" when it  opens in
> with
> emacs 3.pl
> while it looks fine with
> emacs -nw 3.pl.
>
> If you want to look at the files. I downloaded them  from
>
> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-cpunicode/index.html
> cp35.zip
>
> What is wrong with my  setup. What can I do so that the characters
> will display in both the x windows and term version of emacs?

The -nw sessions use whatever font happens to be the terminal font for
your currently open terminal window.

For standalone X11 sessions of Emacs you will have to use a font that
supports Greek UTF-8 text.  I regularly type Greek text using either the
UTF-8 or the ISO 8859-7 coding system using the `DejaVu Sans Mono' or
the `Liberation Mono' fonts.

You can install the DejaVu fonts in Debian by typing:

    # apt-get install ttf-dejavu

You can install the Liberation fonts by typing:

    # apt-get install ttf-liberation

Then it should be possible to see these fonts in the output of fc-list:

    # fc-list ':lang=el' | fgrep -i mono
    DejaVu Sans Mono:style=Bold Oblique
    DejaVu Sans Mono:style=Oblique
    DejaVu Sans Mono:style=Book
    DejaVu Sans Mono:style=Bold
    ...

If the installation completes successfully, and you can see the fonts in
the output of fc-list(1), you can start Emacs with `DejaVu Sans Mono' as
its font, by typing:

    $ emacs -fn 'DejaVu Sans Mono'

Using a different font size then the default is possible too:

    $ emacs -fn 'DejaVu Sans Mono:size=13'