Re: XeTeX encoding problem

[Karl Berry]

    > include every single Unicode character?

Masamichi - Gavin means "all".  The vast majority of fonts cover basic
European.  That's not the issue.

Gavin - there are a few fonts that "aim to" include every character,
though none actually does.  Here's a page with some basic info:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14027/what-fonts-are-good-for-unicode-glyphs

This comparison is more comprehensive (includes many proprietary fonts):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font#List_of_Unicode_fonts.
(You can click the "chars" column to sort by that.)

I don't think any single font, such as DejaVu or GNU Freefont
(=Times-ish), would be at all desirable to set as the default from a
design point of view.  The GNU Unifont listed there, which has far more
glyphs than any other, is bitmap-based and unusable for any purpose
except last-ditch fallbacks.  (The Noto font listed there apparently is
neither complete nor officially released.  I'd never heard of it before.)

At any rate, people do not expect to see anything like those as output
from Texinfo, even if one wanted to assume such things were installed.
The lmodern font in M's patch is the best choice in that regard.

As far as I know, the Unicode consortium intends and expects
applications to implement per-block or per-script font switching, rather
than expect fonts provide 100% of Unicode, which would be unrealistic in
the extreme.  And I believe that (switching) is what web browsers do.  -k