Re: [I18ndir] [art] Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-bray-unichars-04.txt

[Steffen Nurpmeso <[e-mail]>]

Tim Bray wrote in
 <[e-mail]>:
 |On Sep 15, 2023 at 1:43:53 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso <[e-mail]> wrote:
 |>     Noncharacters and legacy controls are unlikely to cause software
 |>     failures, but they cannot usefully be displayed to humans, and can be
 ...
 |> For the purpose of "usefully displaying to humans" Unicode has the
 |> dedicated code points U+2400 "SYMBOL FOR NULL" - U+2421 "SYMBOL
 |> FOR DELETE", plus U+2424 - U+2426.
 |
 |That’s horrible. I’m not convinced that “useful” applies.

Sure it is, you need to visualize them shall they are part of data
to be displayed?
Otherwise you could only make them invisible to the human glance,
use anonymizing replacement or placeholder characters, or
otherwise would have to use replacement strings that excess the
visual width of 1.  Like, eg.,

  # head -c10 snailmail.jpg | cat -vet
  M-^?M-XM-^?M-`^@^PJFIF

or even

  # head -c10 snailmail.jpg | hex-
00000000  ff d8 ff e0 00 10 4a 46  49 46                    |......JFIF|
0000000a

..and i (polemically) do not know if that is better.  (Except for
this example.  And aside the "standard" is now \c. not ^..)
I have yet to encounter a font that does not support them.

  ...

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)