Subject: bug#41747: 27.0.91; Add default fontset setup for "Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A"

From: Kévin Le Gouguec <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 10:36:44 +0200

Richard Stallman <[email-masked]> writes:

> However, it would be good to show the community that we are looking for
> people to design free repacements for those nonfree font extensions.
> I will discuss the issue with someone that works on free fonts.

NB: as highlighted earlier in the thread[1], there already are some free
fonts covering the newer characters.

They are color fonts though, so I don't think it would make sense to use
them just for "Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A": I expect users would
find it jarring if Emacs displayed emoji from this specific block with a
color font, yet displayed all others with a "regular"[2] font.

IMO the best way forward would be to consult Unicode's emoji list[3],
and enrich setup-default-fontset by iterating over every range and

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" range
                  '("Noto Color Emoji" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)

The (somewhat) complicated part is listing all ranges; it's not clear to
me yet if we want to do this manually, at compile-time, or once per
Unicode release, using scripts under admin/.

[1] <[email-masked]>
    https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=41747#22

[2] Non-color?  Black?  Monochrome?  😕

[3] https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/emoji/emoji-data.txt