Re: Suggest installing more fonts?

[Gregory Heytings via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>]

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>> I think, over the years, the most common question users have that has 
>> an easy-to-fix solution is: "Why is Emacs displaying boxes for some of 
>> these characters I'm seeing?"  The solution is "install some more 
>> fonts", of course.
>
> [ FWIW, I don't think replacing those tofu chars with some "ugly 
> default" is a good option: it's more work with very little benefit if 
> any, since the problem still remains largely unchanged. ]
>

FWIW, I do not agree with this.  It is much better from a end-user 
viewpoint to see something they can decypher, even if it has a non-optimal 
rendering, than to see a hex code in a box.  For example, I use the DejaVu 
Sans font.  I just checked, and among the twelve "smiling face" emojis, 
three are missing, for example "smiling face with smiling eyes and three 
hearts".  I would find it much better to have Emacs displaying the 
attached bitmap (taken from the Unicode font) instead of a box with 
"01F970" (for the default value of glyphless-char-display).  At least I 
see what the character is.

[I know that an experienced user can do M-x describe-char or C-u C-x =, or 
(setq what-cursor-show-names t) and type C-x =.  But that's for 
experienced users, and in any case much less user-friendly than a bitmap.]

>
> - Does the problem only affect Emacs and not other applications? If so 
> why?  If not, then what do other applications do about it?
>

This problem affects all applications.  If happens whenever an application 
tries to display a character for which the font in use has no glyph. 
What they do varies, most display a question mark in a box, or an empty 
box.

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