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When I open a file with some UTF-8 text in it the characters show up as boxes.

I think I have a font missing, because I can safely edit these boxes and the changes will turn out correctly when I look at them in another text editor (for example from Vim in terminal).

Also at startup Emacs prints out the following warning:

Warning: no fonts matching `-*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1' available [2 times]

I have tried installing several X.org font packages to my system but that doesn't seem to help.

Using GNU Emacs 22.3

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
4

Try and set DejaVu Sans Mono as the font. That's a font for Unicode that is normally installed by default on any Linux distribution.

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  • This kind of solved my problem, as to use DejaVu Sans Mono font I had to upgrade to Emacs 23, as 22 doesn't support TrueType fonts. Apparently after upgrade Emacs automagically selected DejaVu Sans Mono as its default font.
    – Rene Saarsoo
    Commented Jul 27, 2009 at 14:01
  • Glad it helped!
    – Mike McQuaid
    Commented Jul 27, 2009 at 14:03
  • Emacs 23 added xft support which makes life much more livable in the world of fonts and emacs.
    – baudtack
    Commented Dec 23, 2009 at 7:24
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The fonts error is probably a red herring. This message usually comes up because Emacs thinks it should use a font this specification for some of its output. If you need/want to fix it then finding the faulty specification and fixing it is the recommended route (e.g. http://braeburn.aquamacs.org/code/master/etc/PROBLEMS).

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  • 1
    Upgrading to Emacs 23 also seemed to remove this warning message.
    – Rene Saarsoo
    Commented Jul 27, 2009 at 14:02
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Unicode (name or hex):

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1145889/emacs-xterm-mousepad-c-unicode-and-utf-8-trying-to-make-sense-of-it-all

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  • What do you mean by "name or hex"? And what should I look for in that question you pointed out?
    – Rene Saarsoo
    Commented Jul 27, 2009 at 9:31
  • There are some answer for this problem ..
    – joe
    Commented Jul 27, 2009 at 9:39
  • If you mean (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8) then I do have that in my .emacs file. I also tried adding all the following lines, but that didn't help.
    – Rene Saarsoo
    Commented Jul 27, 2009 at 9:55

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