bug#656: Glyphs in Private Use Area not displayed in Emacs CVS

[Jason Rumney]

Alex Speed Kjeldsen wrote:
> I have no special code in the .emacs file apart from the specification 
> of which font to use. Today on a fresh arch GNU/linux install where I 
> installed the package "emacs-cvs" (23.0.60) and didn't have an .emacs 
> file, the problem was still there, when I started emacs this way:
>
>       emacs --font 
> "FONT_WHICH_INCLUDES_THE_GLYPHS_AND_WORKS_IN_DEC_2007_VERSION-FONTSIZE"
>
> The glyphs in PUA just show up as boxes

Looking at what you wrote above again, I think the problem is that Emacs 
now looks in greater detail at which unicode characters fonts have, 
rather than blindly using any iso10646-1 font for all unicode 
characters. For characters in PUA you will need to explicitly tell Emacs 
how to display them as follows, since Emacs cannot automatically 
recognize which fonts contain the characters you want:

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default"  '(#xe000 . #xf8ff) FONT-SPEC)