bug#15420: 24.3; Symbols like 🚴 (U+1F6B4) are not displayed by default

[Stephen Berman]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 18:40:09 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>> From: Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>
>> Cc: Mike FABIAN <maiku.fabian@gmail.com>,  larsi@gnus.org,
>>   15420@debbugs.gnu.org
>> Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2019 17:19:55 +0200
>>
>> > You will see in lisp/international/fontset.el that the #x1F680 --
>> > #x1F6FF block is now configured to use Symbola by default, which is
>> > why the BICYCLE and BICYCLIST are displayed without any changes.  As
>> > for the Egyptian Hieroglyphs, we don't do anything about them,
>>
>> Is this for technical reasons (e.g. redisplay speed) or a policy
>> decision such as not enough free fonts?  I ask because e.g. Firefox
>> seems to automatically find an installed font; for example, on my system
>> Firefox displays the hieroglyphs on
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_block)>,
>> presumably using the Aegyptus fonts installed in my system, while EWW
>> does not display the hieroglyphs (but does e.g. display the emoticons on
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticons_(Unicode_block)>, some using
>> DejaVu, some using Symbola).
>
> Firefox has a long list of known fonts stored in its database out of
> the box.  We don't for 2 reasons: (1) we don't want to reference
> non-free fonts, and (2) we want to be able to support the use case of
> installing a font while the session runs.
>
> The above may or may not be relevant to the Egyptian Hieroglyphs case;
> volunteers are welcome to step through the font lookup process in
> Emacs in that case and see whether we should add something to our
> fontset-related databases.  After all, this script is quite rare, and
> was added to Unicode at a relatively late date, so something might be
> amiss.

I see you added support for displaying Egyptian hieroglyphs by default
-- thanks!

Steve Berman