Re: Pango-like font fallback (was Re: Russian numero sign)

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <address@hidden>, Paul Pogonyshev <address@hidden> writes:

>> But, unify-8859-on-encoding-mode should be on by default (at
>> least with CVS HEAD emacs).
>> 
>> Paul, do you turn it off intentionally?  Can you reproduce
>> this problem by starting your emacs with "-Q"?

> Uh, indeed.  I think I turned it off because of poor support of
> Cyrillic characters by the fonts...  If I start it with `-Q',
> the numero sign is automatically encodable in UTF-8 as it
> should be, but the Cyrillic characters appear as boxes which is
> of course even worse for me.

unify-8859-on-encoding-mode is not relevant how to read (or
decode) Cyrillic characters encoded in UTF-8, nor how to
display Cyrillic characters decoded into
mule-unicode-0100-24ff charset.

Do you really mean that you solved the display problem by
turning it off?

Anyway, your display problem is because of your
adobe-courier-*-iso10646-1 font doesn't support Cyrillic
characters.

Please try to select "fontset->standard" by shift-mouse1.
It makes "fixed" the default family, thus has the higher
possibility of selecting an iso10646-1 font that support
Cyrillic.

If that doesn't help, or you don't want "fixed" the default
family, please find a family name of an iso10646-1 font that
support Cyrillic, and try this:

(set-fontset-font
 "fontset-default"
 'mule-unicode-0100-24ff
 '("_HERE_COMES_FAMILY_NAME_" . "iso10646-1"))

> I wonder if Emacs could implement some smart font substitution
> when a glyph is not available in a font.

I implemented such a feature fairly long ago in
emacs-unicode-2 branch.  Unfortunately, Emacs of CVS HEAD
lacks infrastructure to support it.

---
Kenichi Handa
address@hidden