Re: utf8 char display in buffer

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com> writes:
> Displaying the UCS Code Point for characters which lack font support is
> the norm in GTK.  This is done by drawing a box around four or six digit
> glyphs which are rendered in a smaller point size.  I'd expect that this
> is easier to read when using a proportional face.
>
> Apple went in a slightly different direction and commissioned a fallback
> font from Michael Everson which has one glyph per Unicode script and uses
> that for each character associated with said script.
>
> Emacs could easily do either (w/o the need for a font in the latter case).

The GTK method does screw up one good thing about emacs' method -- the
boxes it displays are generally the correct width (single- or double-
width [CJK etc]), so text alignment is preserved.

The apple method might be able to preserve the width, and seems better
for the user anyway -- I think the most useful info is "what kind of
font should I install to fix this" and/or "do I really care enough to
fix this", so identifying the script is probably more important than
identifying the precise codepoint.

Drew's suggestion of a tooltip seems like it might be easier to
implement, and more functional than either in practice though --
it could display a lot more information without screwing up alignment,
basically a slightly more convenient/obvious version of C-x =

-Miles

-- 
Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.