Multilingual Font Control

Multilingual Font Control

[Richard Wordingham]

I don't use Thai in Emacs very often at the moment, and I hit a display
problem when I had to use it urgently the other night.  I used
describe-char to identify the immediate cause - Emacs was using the
barely readable 'handwritten' font Purisa instead of the usual
default, Kinnari.

I've fixed the problem for many purposes by simply adding the line

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'thai "Kinnari") ;; Def. not Purisa

to my .emacs.  However, this command looks as though it may not work
well with font-locking, which may select other font sets.  Is there
some other method I should use?  I need to specify a font for other
character ranges, so I currently have:

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" '(#x1a20 . #x1aad) "Da Lekh")
(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" '(#x13000 . #x1342f) "NewGardiner")
(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'thai "Kinnari") ;; Def. not Purisa

Richard.

Re: Multilingual Font Control

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2018 08:26:06 +0000
> From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
> 
> I don't use Thai in Emacs very often at the moment, and I hit a display
> problem when I had to use it urgently the other night.  I used
> describe-char to identify the immediate cause - Emacs was using the
> barely readable 'handwritten' font Purisa instead of the usual
> default, Kinnari.

What Emacs version was that, and on what OS?

> I've fixed the problem for many purposes by simply adding the line
> 
> (set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'thai "Kinnari") ;; Def. not Purisa
> 
> to my .emacs.  However, this command looks as though it may not work
> well with font-locking, which may select other font sets.

Why do you think it will not work with font-lock?  I see no reason why
it shouldn't.

> Is there some other method I should use?

No (but do try Emacs 25.2 or later first).  If the default fontset is
not to your liking for some script or range of codepoints, you should
customize your fontset as you did.

Re: Multilingual Font Control

[Richard Wordingham]

On Thu, 25 Jan 2018 19:05:03 +0200
Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2018 08:26:06 +0000
> > From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
> > 
> > I don't use Thai in Emacs very often at the moment, and I hit a
> > display problem when I had to use it urgently the other night.  I
> > used describe-char to identify the immediate cause - Emacs was
> > using the barely readable 'handwritten' font Purisa instead of the
> > usual default, Kinnari.  
> 
> What Emacs version was that, and on what OS?
OS is Ubuntu 16.04.3, Emacs versions 24.4 and 25.3.

> 
> > I've fixed the problem for many purposes by simply adding the line
> > 
> > (set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'thai "Kinnari") ;; Def. not
> > Purisa
> > 
> > to my .emacs.  However, this command looks as though it may not work
> > well with font-locking, which may select other font sets.  
> 
> Why do you think it will not work with font-lock?  I see no reason why
> it shouldn't.

I thought that other faces would be defined by the time .emacs executed
the expression.  Looking closer, it does seem that they are defined
later, and presumably based on fontset-default by default.

Richard.

Re: Multilingual Font Control

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2018 19:37:41 +0000
> From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
> 
> > Why do you think it will not work with font-lock?  I see no reason why
> > it shouldn't.
> 
> I thought that other faces would be defined by the time .emacs executed
> the expression.  Looking closer, it does seem that they are defined
> later, and presumably based on fontset-default by default.

Yes, of course.  Because that's the only thing that would make sense.

In general, Emacs will never change a font unless the default one
fails to support some feature (or explicitly told to do so by the
user), and with faces normally used by font-lock, that should never
happen.