Re: Consistent vanilla Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 15 May 2020 00:21:57 +0300
> 
> > 3. We currently don't ship any fonts with GNU Emacs.  Maybe we should
> >     consider doing that?  It seems to me that many other applications do.
> >     Or maybe we should introduce a stronger set of default fonts for
> >     different systems.
> 
> IIRC Eli said that we can't distribute fonts for our own use only, 
> whatever fonts are needed the user will have to install system-wide, or 
> put into ~/.fonts, at least.

Technically, we _can_ distribute fonts, but doing so will
inconvenience the users to the degree that I think we should avoid
doing that.  Installation of fonts on the system (with implied effects
on other applications) is indeed that inconvenience.  It is true that
there are ways to make the installation local, but that is even more
of the inconvenience, IMO.

So yes, I don't think we should include fonts in our distribution.  We
could advise users to install fonts that we think will make Emacs look
good, and maybe if we do that for some time, distros will start making
those fonts available by default.  But forcing fonts on users is not
TRT, IMO.  Right now, Emacs uses as its default font the font used by
other similar applications, and I think we should continue doing that,
so as to keep Emacs's text look as in other similar applications on
the system.