font sizes wonky on Windows

[rolandwalker]

Box-drawing characters are assigned here to DejaVu Sans Mono. The character widths are not consistent with other platforms. This is a problem if you actually want to draw a box.

[rneatherway]

I also find that the set braces and mathematical script letters from Cambria cause approximately two lines of whitespace above and below the current line. The braces are also about twice as tall as expected.

Example problem chars:
LEFT CURLY BRACKET MIDDLE PIECE
MATHEMATICAL BOLD SCRIPT CAPITAL V

[rolandwalker]

I'll have to fire up a Windows VM to check on that, Cambria is looking good for me on OS X.

What font should be preferred for those characters?

[rneatherway]

Thanks for the reply. I am using Emacs 24.3.1 on Windows 7. I settled on Symbola in the end, which is quite pleasant, although Cambria was perhaps a bit clearer if it wasn't for the whitespace issue.

I am using the below for the moment. I think that this means for unicode to use Consolas, then fallback to DejaVu, and then Symbola where glyphs are missing.

(set-face-attribute 'default nil :font "DejaVu Sans Mono-12.0")
(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'unicode "Consolas" nil)
(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'unicode "DejaVu Sans Mono" nil 'append)
(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'unicode "Symbola" nil 'append)

[rolandwalker]

It turns out I have visited this issue before, though I mistakenly thought it was resolved after Vista.

You can suppress Cambria Math via customize: enter M-x unicode-fonts-tweaks, choose "Unicode Fonts Skip Font Groups", and unselect select item "Buggy Display Before Vista". I think I will change the settings so that skipping is off on by default on all Windows versions.

The Code2001 font is also quite good for the Mathematical Alphabetic Symbols block.

[rneatherway]

OK great, thanks for the update.