Re: etc/HELLO markup etc.

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: handa <handa@gnu.org>
> Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, Emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2018 16:23:24 +0900
> 
> > I'm not yet sure this is only about Han unification.  Using charsets
> > for specifying fonts is a general feature in Emacs, which can be used
> > to control which fonts are selected independently of what the OS
> > facilities such as fontconfig do.
> 
> > I hope Handa-san will be able to comment on this stuff.
> 
> > If Han unification is the only important user of the charset property,
> > then yes, we could remove the rest of the charset info from HELLO.
> 
> Long ago, the quality of fonts designed for a specific regacy charset
> were far better than so-called Unicode fonts even for non-Han charaters.
> So, the charset information for non-Han charsets did have some meaning.
> But, I don't know the current situation.  Perhaps, it is good to remove
> them and wait for complaint from users.

Thanks.

What about using the charset information in general for font
selection?  Do you think this is a valuable feature, or was it again
designed only due to the issues you mention above with fonts designed
for legacy charsets?