Re: Suggest installing more fonts?

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> For added helpfulness, would it be possible for Emacs to be even more
>> specific?  Like, say "sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji
>> fonts-symbola", or whatever, depending on the system.
>
> For that, you'd need a database of fonts per OS and per release (and I
> think on GNU systems this will have to depend on the distro as well?),
> and you'd need to maintain that database.  Who around here knows
> enough about fonts on different systems to maintain such a database?

To have perfect coverage, we'd need to do a lot of work.  But we don't
have to have that, so we don't need to do that much work.

Having a list of nice fonts with good coverage for, say, the five most
significant operating systems, should be a list of less than thirty
font packages.

>> Fonts change over the years, so this would be an added maintenance
>> burden...  but they don't change a lot: New general-use fonts with good
>> coverage aren't created very often.
>
> IME, the fonts do change quite a lot between releases.

The fonts change, but the number of fonts we care about doesn't.

> I think the best we can do here is (a) add more fonts to the default
> fontset (it isn't trivial, as quite a few good fonts aren't free); and
> (b) have a command to report which of the fonts mentioned in the
> default fontset aren't available.

There's still the issue of letting them know what the issue is.
Clearly, showing them tofu isn't enough, because the issue comes up
again and again.

Popping up a warning buffer (at the first time tofu is displayed per
session) may be OK, but could be annoying?  However, our warning buffers
now have buttons to easily disable the warning permanently, so it might
be OK.

Displaying a message in the echo area (again, only the first time we
tofu in a session) saying something like "Unable to display character;
type `C-h TO-BE-DETERMINED' for more information" might also be an
option.

Or...  adding help echo text props to tofu?  We give non-character bytes
in a buffer a special font, so that would be kinda analogous.

I think there's probably plenty of opportunity here to be more helpful
to the users.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no