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

[Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>]

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>
> I don't see any failure.  Richard's complaint was that characters 
> without glyphs were getting displayed as long hex strings rather than 
> the "diamond" that they were previously displayed as.  I think the 
> complaint has merit.  It seems to me to be a classic case for a user 
> option.
>

You forget to mention that the context in which this bug was fixed in 
January is that RMS complained that ligatures such as "fi" showed up as a 
diamond (see [1]).  At that time what he wanted is that Emacs would 
automatically replace such ligatures by two letters in his Linux console, 
and that's what he got: Eli improved the latin1-display-ucs-per-lynx 
function in fd42ba3adb.  At that time diamonds were considered 
"unhelpful", and he said for example: "I doubt any user wants to see a 
diamond instead of `fi'."

During that discussion, the bug that is now objected against was also 
fixed, by 10c680551e.

I, too, doubt any user wants to see a diamond instead of an actual 
character!  Why are these diamonds suddenly useful again?  How comes that 
a proposed solution with which ligatures such as "fi" are actually 
displayed as "fi", with which UTF-8 is actually supported instead of 
having to resort to ugly hacks such as latin1-display-ucs-per-lynx, and 
with which missing glyphs are in fact again displayed with these same 
diamonds, is criticized?

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-01/msg01176.html