Subject: bug#54970: 28.1; Some emoji no longer display

From: Howard Melman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2022 13:22:45 -0400

On Apr 23, 2022, at 12:58 PM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

> These are all very complex technical issues, and I'm not sure the
> right way of letting users customize Emacs in these respects is to
> expose all that complexity and advertise it.  We should try finding
> easier, more self-explanatory, customization means and options.

> Emacs 28 is the first
> release to include a decent support for Emoji, and we are still
> collecting user experience about what we have.

Agreed.  Fundamentally I think some script or other collection
mechanism that covers "emoji" is what's needed.  I think what's
in Emacs 28 is trying to do that and at least for this mac user
still falls short.

> NEWS describes what we think is the correct setup for Emoji.  I'm
> still not convinced that telling users to customize the font for
> 'symbol' is a good idea, especially since we prefer symbols and
> punctuation to be displayed by the default font as much as possible.

I'm still not clear on this.  With the set-fontset-font calls I describe I
see punctuation (; . ! etc) in Menlo (the font I put in the default and
fixed-pitch faces).  I assume this is because use-default-font-for-symbols
is t which is the default.  So at least on my system this preference works
out just as desired.

> Maybe this contradicts what macOS users expect, but macOS is not the
> main platform we want to support.

Understood but it's still a platform you do support.

> As for mentioning the fonts for which we set up by default -- there
> are others in the default fontset, and I don't see why those two are
> to be treated specially.  OTOH, mentioning all of them would be too
> much, because there are many, and they differ by platforms.  We should
> instead strive to make the default setup work seamlessly for everyone,
> IMO.

Agreed, but the mac platform is confounded because you can't
mention or pre-configure the default font to be used in this case, 
which is fine.  So all I'm asking for is some documentation someplace
that would lead a mac user to the correct incantation or some description
of the possible limitations encountered.  In the absence of "easier, 
more self-explanatory, customization means and options" this seems
like the most reasonable stopgap.

Howard