bug#50865: 28.0.50; Emoji with emoji modifier in Linux console garbles emacs display

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: Aura Kelloniemi <kaura.dev@sange.fi>,  50865@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2022 14:08:42 +0200
> 
> I only lightly skimmed this thread, but there's been some work done in
> this area (displaying non-displayble characters on the console) over the
> last week, and I wonder whether that's fixed this issue, too?

Not really, no.  What was improved was the fallback display via the
extra-slot of glyphless-char-display.  Nothing was done to somehow
make the Linux console display correctly characters from latest
versions of Unicode, which it evidently doesn't support well.

I think the best solution for the Linux console's problems, short of
using fbterm or something similar, is to set up the standard display
table to show unsupported characters as U+FFFD replacements, perhaps
augmented by latin1-display-ucs-per-lynx.  Unfortunately, this
requires customization by users, since each one of them wants to see
certain characters in legible form, and doesn't care about the others.

Bottom line: the Linux console is simply unsuitable for showing
multi-lingual text, let alone Emoji sequences, as users expect
nowadays.