Special Characters on Mac Emacs

[Ulrich Hobelmann <u.hobelmann@web.de>]

Okay, let me wrap up how things work out for me:

(set-keyboard-coding-system 'mac-roman)

seems to be an easy way to make Emacs behave like one would expect it 
to: all special combinations (umlauts, euro symbol, accents) work.

To make Emacs display the stuff the following works:

(create-fontset-from-fontset-spec

"-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--12-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-monaco,
         ascii:-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-120-mac-roman,
         mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-apple-lucida 
grande-medium-r-normal--0-0-75-75-m-0-mac-roman,
         mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-apple-bitstream vera sans mono 
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-75-75-m-0-mac-roman,

latin-iso8859-15:-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-120-mac-roman,

latin-iso8859-1:-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-120-mac-roman"
)

(set-face-font
  'default "-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--12-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-monaco")

It seems, however, that Emacs really only uses the first (ascii) part, 
so I tried changing it to:

(create-fontset-from-fontset-spec

"-apple-Bitstream Vera Sans 
Mono-regular-r-normal--13-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-monaco,
         ascii:-apple-Bitstream Vera Sans 
Mono-regular-r-normal--13-140-75-75-m-120-mac-roman,
         mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-apple-lucida 
grande-medium-r-normal--0-0-75-75-m-0-mac-roman,
         mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-apple-bitstream vera sans mono 
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-75-75-m-0-mac-roman,

latin-iso8859-15:-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-120-mac-roman,

latin-iso8859-1:-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-120-mac-roman"
)

Interestingly now Emacs explodes into the debugger and claims that no 
font matches.  For some reason the very same font works fine with:

(set-face-font 'default "-apple-Bitstream Vera Sans 
Mono-regular-r-normal--13-140-75-75-m-120-mac-roman").  Only then the 
special characters don't display correctly.

What is it that makes Emacs find the font in one instance and not in the 
  other?  And what makes Emacs accept the fontset containing a Monaco 
with mac-roman encoding(!) but display special characters, while loading 
the Bitstream font (also with mac-roman encoding) can't display special 
characters?

The emacs info pages can't really help me.  I don't really understand 
what all those characters and numbers in a fontset stand for...  But 
this doesn't change the fact that emacs doesn't even find my font to 
include it in the fontset.

Regards, Ulrich