Trey Harris posed a question on the Google+ Emacs Community that’s been bothering me for some time. I use the terrific Inconsolata as the default for monospaced fonts but many of the Unicode glyphs are missing. Mac OS X takes care of finding missing glyphs in native apps like Terminal.app or Mail.app but with Emacs I just get a missing glyph. I’ve tried various fixes over the years but nothing worked very well.
Harris suggested using the unicode-fonts package to handle this. Happily, it’s an ELPA package so I just loaded it up and added the required lines to my init.el and those missing glyphs starting appearing in Emacs. Years of frustration gone just like that.
There are still a few missing characters but the README for unicode-fonts lists a few font packages that you can load to supply most characters you’re apt to need. Even without loading the extra fonts, I’ve got almost everything I need so I haven’t bothered with them. If you’ve been having a problem with missing Unicode glyphs, give unicode-fonts a try. It’s easy to load with ELPA and if it doesn’t work for you, it’s easy to uninstall. It’s a huge win for me.