Re: emacs/unicode/chinese tone indication question

[Will Parsons <wbp@nodomain.invalid>]

Brian Inglis wrote:
> On 2017-10-14 20:25, Will Parsons wrote:
>> I use Emacs under multiple operating systems, but chiefly nowadays under
>> FreeBSD and Cygwin/Windows.
>> 
>> I want to use Chinese tone marks in discussing historical Chinese forms, and
>> by "Chinese tone marks" I *don't* mean the overhead vowel marks that are part
>> of pinyin, but the marks indicated by Unicode characters A700 - A707.  These
>> seem to have little support in the more common fonts.
>> 
>> I *have* managed to make these (admittedly unusual) characters visible under
>> FreeBSD by installing the DoulosSIL package.  But how do I do this under
>> Cygwin?  (I am interested in both a native Windows and Cygwin/X solution.)
>
> Have a look at the fonts mentioned here:
> 	http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fontsbyrange.html#ua700
> 	http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/modifier-tone-letters.html

Hmm... That's a bit misleading - it *claims* that the Unicode characters that
I'm interested in are included in the DejaVu fonts, which I had already
installed, but I don't see these glyphs.

> There are Cygwin packages to install for:
> 	dejavu-fonts
> 	noto-cjk-fonts
> 	noto-simplified-chinese-fonts
> 	noto-traditional-chinese-fonts

I had already installed the first two, and I now have installed the last
(which had seemed promising), but to no avail.

> I use the Deja Vu fonts (Mono, Sans, Serif) for terminals, editors, browsers,
> and other apps where fonts may be specified, across systems, as they support a
> lot of characters and ranges, are updated to track Unicode changes, and widely
> packaged.

Yep - I like them too.

> Cygwin Setup permanent postinstall fontconfig script should set these fonts up
> for use by emacs and other apps.
>
> Once installed under Cygwin, you can install these into Windows by running:
> 	$ cygstart /usr/share/fonts/dejavu/
> then dragging the TTF files into the Windows Fonts folder.
>
> You can do similarly with the Google Noto (No Tofu - .jp slang for undefined
> char glyph) fonts, which I don't use, as there are separate packages for
> different language and subranges, although character and range support should be
> more comprehensive.
>
> The above and other fonts mentioned are available in other distributions e.g.
> Debian/Ubuntu packages fonts-sil-charis and fonts-sil-doulos (also fonts-dejavu
> and fonts-noto) which may be installed if you have Windows Subsystem for
> Linux/"Bash for Windows" and copied similarly to Cygwin fonts by running under
> Cygwin:
> 	$ cygstart ~/AppData/Local/lxss/rootfs/usr/share/fonts/truetype/
> then dragging the TTF files from the charis, doulos, dejavu, noto subdirectories
> into the Windows Fonts folder.

Thank you - I didn't know that.

> The other fonts mentioned are readily available by searching on the web.

As it *appears* that the font packages provided by Cygwin setup do not
provide the glyphs I need, and since I already knew that the DoulosSIL
package worked under FreeBSD, I went to the Doulos site and downloaded the
font package from there.  I first copied over the .ttf file to the Windows
font directory, without apparent effect.  But, I cannot say how delighted I
was to find that after copying the .ttf file to the Cygwin fonts directory,
that Cygwin Emacs displayed the characters correctly!

So, although the process was not as straightforward as I might have liked, I
now have a working solution due to your very helpful information.  Thank you.

-- 
Will


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