bug#11889: 23.4; Emacs 23.4.1 jump from one font to another ever all needed chars precent in single font. 22.2.1 work fine.

[Oleksandr Gavenko]

I report about this at:

  http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.help/85735

Now I think that this behaviour is buggy.

================================================================

So what happen? I am Russian/Ukrainian user and also prepare dictionaries so
use IPA (C-\ ipa RET) chars.

And I prefer monospaced fonts so expect that all chars would be vertically
aligned.

But this is not happen in case of Emacs 23.4.1 (from Debian GNU Linux,
Wheezy)...

In previous Emacs version 22.x this work (I check this on same host).

================================================================

So I eval:

  (set-frame-font "7x13")

For EN text I get (from C-u C-x =):

  x:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1 (#x28)

For RU text I get:

  xft:-Misc-Fixed-normal-normal-normal-*-13-*-*-*-c-80-iso10646-1 (#x394)

As you see for Russian text Emacs use different font and I loose vertical
alignment for text.

Next example:

  (set-frame-font "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-13-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*")

and for russian letter get (ugly bold large letters):

  xft:-Misc-Fixed-normal-normal-normal-ja-13-*-*-*-c-120-iso10646-1 (#x1FC)

After a lot of experimanting I found:

  (set-frame-font "-rfx-courier-medium-r-normal-*-14-*-75-75-*-iso10646-1")

which good for EN/RU exept missing 13px size. 12 too small, 14 look large.

I accept the situation and use this fornt until back to edit
dictionary with IPA letters.

Some IPA letters shown as @ instead of ə:

         to input: type "/e" with ipa
    xft:-rfx-Courier-normal-normal-normal-*-14-*-*-*-m-90-iso10646-1 (#x323)
  name: LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA

================================================================

So instead of looking for font where Emacs produce acceptable output it must
work as in 22.x series. Look for Emacs 22.2.1 with:

  (set-frame-font "7x13")

I get text which looks RIGHT and font is **SAME** for all chars. Look for EN,
RU, IPA chars respectively:

  character: d (100, #o144, #x64, U+0064)
     -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO8859-1 (#x64)
  character: ʌ (332332, #o1211054, #x5122c, U+028C)
     -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1 (#x28C)
  character: д (332884, #o1212124, #x51454, U+0434)
     -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1 (#x434)

================================================================

I don't know if it possible to work around this issue.

I think it was related to Xft font support.

Really I happy with server-side fonts and dislike anti-aliasing for text
editing.

================================================================

In GNU Emacs 23.4.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.10)
 of 2012-04-07 on trouble, modified by Debian
Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11201902
configured using `configure  '--build' 'x86_64-linux-gnu' '--build' 
'x86_64-linux-gnu' '--prefix=/usr' '--sharedstatedir=/var/lib' 
'--libexecdir=/usr/lib' '--localstatedir=/var/lib' '--infodir=/usr/share/info' 
'--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--with-pop=yes' 
'--enable-locallisppath=/etc/emacs23:/etc/emacs:/usr/local/share/emacs/23.4/site-lisp:/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/23.4/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp'
 '--with-crt-dir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu' '--with-x=yes' 
'--with-x-toolkit=gtk' '--with-toolkit-scroll-bars' 
'build_alias=x86_64-linux-gnu' 'CFLAGS=-g -O2 -fstack-protector 
--param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Wformat-security -Werror=format-security 
-Wall -DDEBIAN -O2' 'CPPFLAGS=-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2''

Important settings:
  value of $LANG: ru_RU.UTF-8
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix
  default enable-multibyte-characters: t

-- 
Best regards!