RE: Suggest installing more fonts?

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

[Once again, had to add emacs-devel manually.
 `Reply All' wasn't good enough.]

> I attach three pictures of the same
> short tamil text displayed by Emacs, one with its current behavior
> (tamil-no-font.png), one if it used Unifont as a fallback
> (tamil-unifont.png), and one if a proper tamil font (the Debian package
> fonts-lohit-taml) is installed (tamil-good-font.png).  I do agree (of
> course) that tamil-good-font.png is better than tamil-unifont.png, but I
> really can't understand how tamil-no-font.png could be considered better
> than tamil-unifont.png.

(Caveat: Not following the details of this thread.)

I think, at least for the case shown by those images,
that showing the less-than-ideal, but presumably
readable, chars is better than just showing tofus.

However, in that case, it would be good if Emacs
could also (optionally, in case notification would
bother some users) notify you that you didn't have
a font supporting some chars, and so Emacs used font
Unifont as a fallback.

If Emacs could further highlight or otherwise show
which chars (or some of them) it's talking about,
that would be even more helpful.

IOW, if Emacs could (1) make it possible to read the
text, showing more/all chars, even if with a poor
font, AND (2) tell users that some chars underwent
this display degradation because they don't have a
font installed for them, AND (3) indicate which chars
underwent the possible degradation, that would be an
improvement.

Other things being equal, that is.  E.g., if UI or
performance would be strongly negatively influenced,
then trying to help this way might not be worth it
in some cases.