*** Displaying international characters on X Windows.
A font for X typically displays just one alphabet or script. Therefore, displaying the entire range of characters Emacs supports requires using many fonts.

Therefore, Emacs now supports "fontsets". Each fontset is a collection of fonts, each assigned to a range of character codes.

A fontset has a name, like a font. Individual fonts are defined by the X server; fontsets are defined within Emacs itself. But once you have defined a fontset, you can use it in a face or a frame just as you would use a font.

If a fontset specifies no font for a certain character, or if it specifies a font that does not exist on your system, then it cannot display that character. It will display an empty box instead.

The fontset height and width are determined by the ASCII characters (that is, by the font in the fontset which is used for ASCII characters). If another font in the fontset has a different height, or the wrong width, then characters assigned to that font are clipped, and displayed within a box if highlight-wrong-size-font is non-nil.