Re: Suggest installing more fonts?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2020 23:02:37 +0000
> cc: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Gregory Heytings via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> > I know.  I was just pointing out that there are several problems 
> > (missing fonts is one of them, but not the only one), so before trying 
> > to solve "the problem", we should be clear about which one it is and try 
> > and figure out whether it's indeed the most common.
> 
> A user has (usually) no idea of these "several problems", and knows even 
> less how to fix them.  For such users the problem is simply "Emacs 
> displays gibberish".  That is "the problem" IMO.  Everything else are 
> technicalities that very few know/understand/have the patience to deal 
> with.
> 
> So IMO for these users it would be much better to display characters with 
> a low-resolution font, together with a warning (and perhaps a pointer to a 
> short guide) (as a help-echo and/or in the echo area), instead of a tofu.

Then the problem will become "Emacs uses an ugly font where other apps
don't", and we are none the wiser.

IMO, we should try fixing whatever problems are there (and AFAIU
there's more than one) without using ugly fonts.  For example,
problems with displaying Emoji are due to some missing infrastructure
(see a separate discussion about that), and once we add that, the
result will be much better than anything you could get with Unifont.

IOW, using Unifont is simply a kind of admission of defeat: we don't
really know why Emacs doesn't find a good font, so we take the easy
path of providing _some_ font that will always work, albeit show ugly
glyphs.  I see no need to declare defeat, as we have facilities in
Emacs to solve these problems in a better way, once we understand
them.  We should therefore try to understand the problems better, and
once understood, solve them properly.