Re: Suggest installing more fonts?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2020 12:59:47 +0000
> From: Gregory Heytings <ghe@sdf.org>
> cc: larsi@gnus.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> >> A suggestion: would it not be better to include a version of GNU 
> >> Unifont in Emacs?
> >
> > Including a font with Emacs is problematic, since installing a font 
> > requires system-wide actions.
> 
> PDF readers use the fonts embedded in PDF files, so I would guess that 
> Emacs could use a built-in font (without installing it).

This is not currently supported, AFAIK: Emacs uses the likes of
Fontconfig facilities to search for suitable fonts given a character.

> > (Personally, I think Unifont is an ugly font, with many character glyphs 
> > completely illegible, and distributing is with Emacs will only cause us 
> > look unprofessional.  But that's my personal view.)
> 
> It is an ugly font indeed, the point is only to use it in place of the 
> (even more ugly) boxes with a hex code.  I think it is ugly "by design", 
> it aims at a very broad coverage without becoming too large.

You know it and I know it, but most users won't.  They will just see
the ugly glyphs.  Whether that is less or more ugly than the "tofu" we
show is in the eyes of the beholder; my personal opinion is above.