22.15 Modifying Fontsets

Fontsets do not always have to be created from scratch. If only minor changes are required it may be easier to modify an existing fontset. Modifying ‘fontset-default’ will also affect other fontsets that use it as a fallback, so can be an effective way of fixing problems with the fonts that Emacs chooses for a particular script.

Fontsets can be modified using the function set-fontset-font, specifying a character, a charset, a script, or a range of characters to modify the font for, and a font specification for the font to be used. Some examples are:

     ;; Use Liberation Mono for latin-3 charset.
     (set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'iso-8859-3
                       "Liberation Mono")
     
     ;; Prefer a big5 font for han characters
     (set-fontset-font "fontset-default"
                       'han (font-spec :registry "big5")
                       nil 'prepend)
     
     ;; Use DejaVu Sans Mono as a fallback in fontset-startup
     ;; before resorting to fontset-default.
     (set-fontset-font "fontset-startup" nil "DejaVu Sans Mono"
                       nil 'append)
     
     ;; Use MyPrivateFont for the Unicode private use area.
     (set-fontset-font "fontset-default"  '(#xe000 . #xf8ff)
                       "MyPrivateFont")