Subject: bug#20727: 24.5; Font fallback doesn't work for the Emoji range

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2015 09:01:38 -0700

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Please also see if the latest master fixes the problem for you; if it
> does, then you don't need to send all of the information I requested.

I can't easily try that until Monday, sorry.  But I now have a different problem 
with the patch.

I'm on a machine with Symbola installed now, and with the latest master version 
(commit eb92f89c2125aaf8fdf93cdd85ab46ae278dd950) the display is way worse than 
it was before.  See attached screenshots of Emacs 24.4 and latest master 
displaying the following text in a fundamental-mode buffer:

  abc‘def’ghi
  abc“def”ghi
  abc≤def

I ran Emacs with the arguments "-Q -r -font 
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1".  Emacs 
previously substituted 
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1 for the 
non-alphabetic characters, and this worked well: it's the same font, really, and 
the substitute characters are legible and match the default font well.  In 
contrast, Symbola is varying width, the characters don't match the default font, 
and the characters are in some cases nearly illegible.

Why is Emacs using Symbola in a setup that has good Unicode characters already? 
  Isn't the idea to use Symbola only as a fallback, when the existing fonts 
don't work?