Re: Problems with unicode characters under emacs and Xorg

[David Edmondson <dme@dme.org>]

On Monday, 2020-11-02 at 04:26:27 -08, David Mazieres wrote:

> dm-list-email-notmuch@scs.stanford.edu writes:
>
>> I just installed the ttf-symbola package from AUR and ran fc-cache (not
>> sure if necessary).  Now the problem is completely gone.  Not only that,
>> but I even get the little memo symbol instead of a box with the hex code
>> point number.
>>
>> Thank you so much!  This was driving me nuts for months.
>
> Sadly, I spoke too soon.  This does fix the particular problem that I
> posted, and makes the situation better, but I'm still getting occasional
> lockups, presumably because symbola does not cover every possible
> symbol.  For example, I had another email containing U+8BDD (CJK UNIFIED
> IDEOGRAPH-8BDD), and this one still caused my emacs to spin for many
> minutes, before displaying a box with 8BDD in it.

That one is from:

-isas-song ti-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-160-gb2312.1980-0

though I'm not sure which package provides that.

> So unfortunately the problem seems to be that any character not
> supported by an installed font takes about 2-5 minutes of CPU time to
> resolve.  And of course most characters that I'd use are in installed
> fonts, except that I can control what's in the emails I receive, so this
> makes notmuch very painful to use.  But if no one else is running into
> the problems, then I may be able to get around it by installing whatever
> fonts other people have installed.

I don't seem to have the root problem - that unknown characters cause a
delay. I get the hex-filled box immediately.

dme.
-- 
Maybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the facts.