Re: doc/emacs/mule.texi questions

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Jason Rumney wrote:

> I think standard-fontset-spec is a leftover from Emacs 22 before a font
> backend existed that could automatically sort through the fonts
> available on the user's system. This fontset spec was designed to match
> the fonts in the GNU intlfonts package.  The default fontset is probably
> a leftover too, Emacs displays most international characters out of the
> box now whether you specify a fontset or just a simple font. 

I know very little about fontsets (so it would be great if someone other
than me would proof-read this part of the manual...), but reading those
parts of mule.texi I got the general impression that some of it seems
old.

For example, the GNU intlfonts tarfile is 9 years old. Does anyone still
need to install that, as opposed to just their distribution's font
packages for international characters?

The installation instructions (in mule.texi) refer to "xset fp+". I
guess (?) that still works, but aren't fontconfig files the way to do
that nowadays?

The fontsets docs refer mainly to the old-style font specs like

   -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-standard

I still use those, but I get the impression that most people have moved
on to things like "DejaVu Sans Mono-12" instead. There is little mention
of that in mule.texi.

> No, this is very out of date advice. Mule was stable enough to use in
> elisp files by 20.3 at latest.

Many things related to unibyte were declared obsolete.
Should the "unibyte: t" spec (meaning, load or compile this file of Lisp
code in unibyte mode) be another?