Re: doc/emacs/mule.texi questions

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> writes:

> Some questions prompted by doc/emacs/mule.texi:
>
> 1.
> mule.texi says:
>   
>    The default fontset is most likely to have fonts for a wide variety of
>    non-@acronym{ASCII} characters
>
> However, C-h v standard-fontset-spec says:
>
>   You have the biggest chance to display international characters with
>   correct glyphs by using the standard fontset
>
> Which is correct?

I think standard-fontset-spec is a leftover from Emacs 22 before a font
backend existed that could automatically sort through the fonts
available on the user's system. This fontset spec was designed to match
the fonts in the GNU intlfonts package.  The default fontset is probably
a leftover too, Emacs displays most international characters out of the
box now whether you specify a fontset or just a simple font. 


> 2. Is this still true?
>
>     But be careful not to specify a fontset name in a wildcard resource
>     like @samp{Emacs*Font}---that wildcard specification matches various
>     other resources, such as for menus, and menus cannot handle fontsets.
>                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Yes, at least when Emacs uses toolkit menus, which probably covers more
than 90% of installations these days.  I'm not sure if GTK menus are
affected by such specifications though, Windows and NS menus certainly
are not.


> 3. Is this still true?
>
>     Note particularly that you probably want to ensure that your
>     initialization files are read as unibyte if they contain
>     non-@acronym{ASCII} characters.

No, this is very out of date advice. Mule was stable enough to use in
elisp files by 20.3 at latest.