Unicode 7

[Tim Chase]

On 2014-05-02 19:08, Chris Angelico wrote:
> This is another area where Unicode has given us "a great improvement
> over the old method of giving satisfaction". Back in the 1990s on
> OS/2, DOS, and Windows, a missing glyph might be (a) blank, (b) a
> simple square with no information, or (c) copied from some other
> font (common with dingbats fonts). With Unicode, the standard is to
> show a little box *with the hex digits in it*. Granted, those boxes
> are a LOT more readable for BMP characters than SMP (unless your
> text is huge, six digits in the space of one character will make
> them pretty tiny), and a "Unicode" font will generally include all
> (or at least most) of the BMP, but it's still better than having no
> information at all.

I'm pleased when applications & fonts work properly, using both the
placeholder fonts for "this character is legitimate but I can't
display it with a font, so here, have a box with the codepoint
numbers in it until I'm directed to use a more appropriate font at
which point you'll see it correctly" and the "somebody crammed garbage
in here, so I'll display it with "�" (U+FFFD) which is designated for
exactly this purpose".

-tkc