1F37D ; text ; L2 ; none ; w # V7.0 (🍽) FORK AND KNIFE WITH PLATE

I see an emoji glyph there too for U+1F37D.  This is the plain section 

and U+1F37D is at the end of the top row in this image. There are a lot

of emoji shown in that section but less than in the emojiFont section.

   Howard> Can emacs be configured to display these lone codepoints via my emoji font?
   Howard> I gather that's what using the 'symbol script does but also includes more.
   Howard> Can I (or emacs out-of-the-box) be more selective in the call to 
   Howard> set-fontset-font or some other api?

Yes. Try:

(set-fontset-font t #x1f37d
   '("Apple Color Emoji" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)

For a range of codepoints, replace #x1f37d with something like
'(#x1f37d . #x1f3aa)

Thanks, doing these definitely gets me further to where I'd like:

(set-fontset-font t '(#x1F170 . #x1F6F3) '("Apple Color Emoji" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)
(set-fontset-font t '(#x2139 . #x3299) '("Apple Color Emoji" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)

I'm still confused as to why the above works but this didn't:

(set-fontset-font t 'emoji '("Apple Color Emoji" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)

And I as I look at script-representative-chars, emoji is defined to be  (emoji 127744 128512)
which I think means the hex range x1F300 - x1F600 so shouldn't include x1f37d?

Or does it not because the default expression is text?  And if so how is that

factored into the emoji script symbol passed to set-fontset-font, I don't see

how that's defined other than as this range. And when I specify a range 

directly I get my pretty glyph displayed.

I donʼt think we should follow what the mac does when it contradicts
what Unicode is telling us.

I certainly agree with this.   I see that 

says:

and working through the definition of fully-qualified emoji

a lone U+1F37D is not fully-qualified.  

If I understand emacs' state correctly, insert-char is doing the right thing

because it's just inserting a character.  I think I'm picking an emoji but

I'm not really, I'm picking a single character (in this case U+1F37D). 

A later Emacs will have an emoji input method that would

be like a real emoji picker that lets me insert a proper fully-qualified sequence.

   Howard> And I'll add, if that's displayed equivalently I'd prefer it, because I wouldn't
   Howard> have to deal with "extra invisible characters" after the glyph when
   Howard> using emacs editing commands (unless this is different behavior in 29
   Howard> than in 28 when I add the variation selector character).

Those characters get composed, so they get treated as a single
unit. They really donʼt cause any problems.

Well C-f and C-b seem to move point between them which is somewhat startling.

Modulo `use-default-font-for-symbols'

   Howard> FWIW this variable set to t for me which I think is the default.

I meant you should try setting it to 'nil'.

In an emacs -Q in the scratch buffer I inserted a lone U+1F37D 

Toggling use-default-font-for-symbols had no effect on its display.  

Even after I did:

(set-fontset-font t 'emoji '("Apple Color Emoji" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)