Re: Display of undisplayable characters: \U01F3A8 instead of diamond

[Richard Stallman]

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  > > Eli said it would be difficult to reliably display undisplayable
  > > characters as diamond _on all consoles_.  But I contend that it is not
  > > hard to implement an option to do this _on Linux consoles_.
  > > Eli, is there something difficult about that?

  > Yes: I know of no way of identifying such a console except by its
  > name.  And hard-coding a name of a specific console into our code is
  > inelegant at best.

We are having two miscommunications here.

I did not have in mind that Emacs should automatically identify
Linux consoles or distinguish them from other text consoles.  Rather, the
feature should _reliably display diamonds_ on Linux consoles.  I can easily
make my .emacs file determine whether Emacs is on a Linux console in a way
that is reliable _in my case_, and enable this feature only in that case.

  > More generally, I have no reason to believe that the "feature" of the
  > Linux console whereby it accepts _any_ UTF-8 encoded character and
  > displays the U+FFFD "diamond" replacement for those it has no glyphs,
  > is rock-solid enough.

There is no need to set the requirement that high.  If it works for
user U, that's good enough.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)