Why are some Unicode characters invisible in Emacs?

Question

I've been doing some tricks with Emacs Unicode support, and for the most part it works great. However, not all Unicode characters seem to display, even when they are in the font. For instance:

→ ‽ ← There is supposed to be an interrobang there

The above (assuming it gets rendered properly) has normal ASCII chars, a couple of Unicode arrows, and a Unicode INTERROBANG (a very useful glyph that needs more widespread use). However, the Interrobang will not show up in Emacs no matter what. I'm displaying in DejaVu Sans which definitely has the right glyph. OpenOffice can open the file and shows the glyph. But I can't get Emacs to show it no matter what I try.

This is Emacs 24.1.1 on the Mac.

Answer 1

Try using the unicode-fonts package. You can install it through M-x package-install unicode-fonts, and then put the following in your .emacs:

(require 'unicode-fonts)
(unicode-fonts-setup)

Most unicode fonts now work for me. Some characters like BEER MUG still won't display for me though. I'm also using emacs (v24.3 installed using homebrew) on a mac.

EDIT: Apparently, some symbols still won't display because of this bug.