Re: Some unicode symbols can't be displayed

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Julien Cubizolles <j.cubizolles@free.fr>
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2017 22:41:11 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > "emacs -nw" uses the font of the terminal emulator.
> 
> > Bottom line: install a suitable font.  On my system, this character is
> > displayed in Emacs using the Symbola font.
> 
> Thanks, installing the Symbola font fixed it, even though Emacs is using
> DejaVu Sans Mono. It must somehow fall back to Symbola.

Yes, it falls back to Symbola (or other fonts, see fontset.el in the
Emacs sources) when the default font cannot display a character.

> It's strange however that the terminal emulator had a "better"
> fallback than Emacs.

Perhaps the terminal emulator used something other than DejaVu Sans
Mono as its default?  Or maybe it installs the fonts it needs as part
of its installation?  Emacs doesn't install fonts, and we don't want
to specify non-free fonts as fallbacks, so we have more limitations
than an arbitrary program out there.