Re: Suggest installing more fonts?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:46:55 +0200
> 
> I just looked at the HELLO file on this system, and these are the fonts
> that Emacs has chosen (there's no tofu in the buffer):
> 
> Unifont
> DejaVu Sans Mono
> Various things from the Noto Serif/Noto Sans family of fonts -- I think
>   they're all from the fonts-noto-core and fonts-noto-extra packages
> Symbola
> FreeSerif
> 
> Plus daewoo, for Korean.
> 
> So that'd be just about all the fonts (and possibly packages) we'd have
> to mention on the font help page.

Uninstall Unifont (which I thought we agreed shouldn't be used), then
try again.

And are we okay with telling people to install Noto fonts?  There are
a lot of fonts in that collection, I'm not sure they are really
needed.  For example, do modern GNU/Linux systems really come without
CJK fonts?

Also, if this is the way we want to go, we should have separate advice
for MS-Windows users, where there are several system specific issues
regarding font search by Emacs, and many users are unable to install
fonts system-wide due to fascist corporation policies.

And finally, HELLO is not necessarily the right instrument to judge
this issue, because it doesn't pretend to cover many codepoints.
Users with special needs might very well need rarely-used characters
or even special-purpose fonts (e.g., think about scholars who need to
read text in some ancient script, or someone whose hobby is to write
Klingon).  As Unicode advances, more and more specialized scripts are
added to it, and HELLO explicitly avoids having too many ancient
"dead" scripts, for practical reasons.  Users who need such rare
characters and scripts will bump into missing glyphs whether you want
it or not, and we will never be able in practice to have every such
font in a list that we can name explicitly.

That is why I would propose a general advice that doesn't name
specific fonts.  It is easy to find fonts for a known script nowadays.