How can I change the emacs unicode font?

Question

I'm using Emacs 23 on OS X, and I am able to change the font that is used for standard keyboard characters, but I've noticed that when I use non-English unicode characters (such as Japanese Kanji or Greek letters) the font used is different.

How can I change this fallback font to be the font of my choosing instead of whatever Emacs wants to use?

Answer 1

Here's how:

Figure out the character set the particular glyphs you want are in. You can do this using M-x list-character-sets. Then, assuming you don't have any super-advanced configuration going on, add something like this to your appropriate elisp file:

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default"
                  'greek-iso8859-7
                  '("Liberation Mono" . "iso10646-1"))

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default"
                  'japanese-jisx0208
                  '("Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro" . "iso10646-1"))

Answer 2

Try setting the default font: M-x menu-set-font. You have to make sure, that the font contains the Japanese characters. Not every font contains every character. If the font does not contain the characters, Emacs will use a font which contains them.

You can also try to customize a specific face with M-x customize-face.