fallback font

[Dan Jacobson]

Regarding these Unicode characters,
$ echo U+01D0 U+01D1 U+01D2 U+01D3 U+01D4 U+01D5 ...|ascii2uni -P

I am comfortable with
(setq default-frame-alist
      (append
       '((font . "-sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-120-100-100-c-80-iso8859-1"))
       default-frame-alist))

But that makes them vertical squares.

If vertical squares mean that emacs can't find the character in that
font then how I can tell emacs to use its emacs -q font instead, or
e.g., "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1" as a
fallback font?

Good news, I have discovered "27.16 Defining fontsets" in the info
system.

Bad news. That Info page is designed for users with advanced brain
facilities.

Shall I instead of my above default-frame-alist item, use in .Xresources,

     Emacs.Fontset-0: 
-sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-120-100-100-c-80-iso8859-1,\
        WHAT_HERE?:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1

Or is that just another route to hours of experimentation and final
failure.

All I know is
-sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-120-100-100-c-80-iso8859-1 looks nice,
and I would like to use
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1 for the
characters it can't handle.

I see, they aren't exactly the same size. No wonder it won't work.

Well then tell me what to apt-get next time I go to town where there
is bandwidth to download big packages.

(Debian emacs-snapshot package, version 1:20060923-1)