How hard would 16-bit fonts be?

How hard would 16-bit fonts be?

[John Wiegley]

I'm starting to receive e-mail in Persian, and it's a bummer seeing
my *Article* buffers full of empty box characters.  utf-8 displays
fine in Mozilla (using a TrueType Times Roman font); how much work
would be involved to handle the same character display in Emacs?

Thanks,
  John

Re: How hard would 16-bit fonts be?

[Simon Josefsson]

John Wiegley <johnw@gnu.org> writes:

> I'm starting to receive e-mail in Persian, and it's a bummer seeing
> my *Article* buffers full of empty box characters.  utf-8 displays
> fine in Mozilla (using a TrueType Times Roman font); how much work
> would be involved to handle the same character display in Emacs?

Empty box characters usually mean you are missing fonts.  Try
installing all font packages you can find.

Even after installing all available fonts from e.g. Debian it is not
difficult to encounter empty boxes though.  Even C-h H show empty
boxes for Amharic, Tibetan, Tigrigna, Greek, Hebrew and Russian.  If I
start emacs with -fn
-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1 I see the
Greek, Hebrew and Russian text so it is possible to display them.
Maybe emacs' font locator doesn't try hard enough to find an
applicable font?