bug#58328: 28.2; can't select MacOS "System Font" using set-fontset-font

[Michael Norrish via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

On 7/10/2022, 16:01, "Gerd Möllmann" <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com> wrote:

    Michael Norrish <u4087502@anu.edu.au> writes:

    >
    > I am able to paste the subscripts into TextEdit, and when I move my
    > cursor to the relevant character, it tells me that I'm using something
    > called "System Font".

    Well, I don't know what TextEdit does, and why.

    But you didn't say if Font Book says about which fonts are there.  You
    can start Font Book with Spotlight - Command-Space, enter font book, and
    return.  Is there a font named "System Font".  If not, Emacs won't be
    able to load that font.

    If you want to know what font Terminal is using, start Terminal, invoke
    Terminal > Preferences from the menu bar, select "Profiles" in the
    dialog box, and the "Text" tab on the right side.  There you find it
    under "Font".

Both Terminal (and TextEdit) appear to be substituting in another font when the chosen font is not available for the given characters.  In particular, I set my font profile in Terminal to use Inconsolata, but it does not have those subscript characters, so I guess it falls back to the system font (it's pretty obvious that this is happening visually). Various sources indicate that this font (apparently also called San Francisco) is deliberately not available through font-pickers. See, for example,

   apple.stackexchange.com/questions/208849/is-there-a-user-font-for-san-francisco-in-el-capitan

Nonetheless, this used to work, and the error message indicates that whatever code Emacs is using is now deprecated, and that it should be doing something else. I appreciate that special-casing this particular font "name" might be a bit much to ask for.  (In the meantime, I will use DejaVu Sans Mono instead.)

Thanks,
Michael