Subject: bug#19993: 25.0.50; Unicode fonts defective on Windows

From: Ilya Zakharevich <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2015 00:46:07 -0800

On Sun, Mar 08, 2015 at 12:38:05AM -0800, Ilya Zakharevich wrote:
> When Emacs wants to show a character using a fontset:
>   • Emacs looks in the fontset and finds the font specifications associated
>     to this character.
>   • Emacs checks which Unicode Subset contains the given character.
> 		(What if not unique???)
>   • From fonts matching the font specifications, Emacs picks up those
>     which have this Unicode Subset “identified” within the font.
>   • From these, Emacs choses one (which?).
> 
> Emacs uses this procedure for two fontsets: the currently enabled one, and
> the default fontset.  If none of two obtained fonts supports the given
> character, a HEX representation is shown.
> =======================================================

Interesting tidbit:

  57	D800 - DFFF	Non-Plane 0. Note that setting this bit implies that
  	       		there is at least one supplementary code point
  	       		beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) that
  	       		is supported by this font. See Surrogates and
  	       		Supplementary Characters.

Extrapolating (since there is no other way to treat this), having a
Subset “identified” may mean just that there is at least 1 character
in this range supported by the font.  ;-)  :-(

Ilya