Enigmatic KATE!

I have configured Kate to use DejaVu Sans font. The font does not have any devanagari characters. But when I type in devanagari, Kate displays it perfectly!

Is Kate auto-substituting DejaVu Sans with something else? Following is some devanagari text for you to try it out.

देवनागरी लिपी

Kate doesn't do font rendering, it uses QTextLayout, which in turn uses QFont, which supports substitutions. So it's probably that doing the substitution, I would guess. If that guess is correct then you should observe the same behaviour in almost all Qt applications.

Is that a problem?

Greetings

Not a problem, per se. It is still showing the same text.

But how do I know what font is being used and how do I change it so as to better suit personal preferences?

You could use a font which has the characters you need, then it shouldn't pick a substitute, no? As for how to change the subsitutes, I don't know, sorry.