Re: [h-e-w] Displaying Unicode - font substitution for missing glyphs

[Jason Rumney]

John Brown <address@hidden> writes:

> On Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 - Precise Pangolin) I see that emacs 23.3.1 
> displays all the symbols in the default font (whatever it was; I
> did not have to change it) and in any other font that I tried,
> although on Linux only a handful of fonts were available.

Generally, a modern GNU/Linux distribution will come with a broad range
of fonts that cover all of Unicode Basic Plane and a significant number
of characters in supplementary planes 1 and 2.  By comparison, Windows
might come with more variety of fonts for the commonly used European
and East Asian languages but the coverage is missing some Basic Plane
characters (especially Mathematical symbols, and scripts for minor
languages from Asia, Africa and North America) and has few (if any)
characters from the supplemental planes.
 
Basically you need to figure out which characters are missing, and go
looking for fonts that cover those characters in a Unicode compatible
way (the Windows Symbol font, for example, may contain some of those
missing characters, but without Unicode mapping).