I made the big upgrade to Emacs 27.1, giving myself a full day to work out the kinks. First off, it’s great; I like the early-init, I’m thrilled by the new in-box orgmode, and as things settle I love the new fonts and customizations. There is some strangeness on this journey, though (made worse by the fact that I am an exwm user, so emacs failures are system failures). Everything died.

Question When I do insert-char (C-x 8 RET) I get lots of “no character” font displays, as when I seek characters matching “smil”. Can I fix this without rebuilding emacs? Answer Solved by following https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts. Just put the .ttf files in my ~/.fonts dir, and where the repo links were broken I was able to download the font from google fonts. Didn’t even have to restart my emacs. Thread https://www.

Recently many fonts are unusable in gimp because the underlying Pango library ceased to support bitmap fonts, resulting in the majority of fonts on my system being unusable by Gimp (including anything Adobe). When editing a form I filled out with gimp last year, I need to change all text fields (ie each field of the form) to one of the working fonts. This tedious task demands a more efficient solution if I’m going to be doing it repeatedly; apparently, it might be time for learning gimp plugins.