Re: char-displayable-p returns t for undisplayable characters

[Jonathan Yavner]

Miles> Perhaps the general problem is that you don't have proper fonts
Miles> installed (something which is always an issue with unicode -- many
Miles> fonts claiming to be unicode fonts aren't really...)

Indeed it may come down to this, but I have (to the best of my knowledge) a 
standard installation of RedHat 8.0 fonts, which is still a popular distro.  
Do all RH8'ers have this problem?

It can't be that my fonts lack the square-root symbol, because kmail displays 
it, and char-displayable-p returns a list of fonts, suggesting that it 
searched for this char and found it someplace.  Perhaps there is a mismatch 
between the search performed by char-displayable-p and the one in the 
display-update routine?

Similarly, xterm is willing to display e-acute, but not for Emacs, so it isn't 
"just" a font problem.


Miles> I suspect it's a problem with the way xterm displays utf8 (i.e., emacs
Miles> thinks it can display any utf8 character, because the terminal claims
Miles> to support utf8, but the terminal doesn't follow through).

Yes, this part of my bug report might be unfixable, but the problem with 
e-acute suggests that maybe there is hope.


Mike> As I mentioned in an earlier post, this all works properly for me under
Mike> x11.

So (insert (decode-char 'ucs 8730)) works for you?  I'm using
    -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-standard
with XFree86 fonts 4.2.0-72