On 21 May 2026, at 9:58, John Levine wrote:

It appears that  <[email protected], [email protected]> said:
Internet-Draft draft-rswg-rfc7997bis-10.txt is now available. It is a work item of the RFC Series Working Group (RSWG) Editorial Stream Working Group of
the IETF.

  Title:   Text in RFCs
  Author:  Paul Hoffman
  Name:    draft-rswg-rfc7997bis-10.txt

I should have mentioned this nine revisions ago, but it seems to me that a lot of this document only applies to the Line Printer Memorial text format, not HTML or PDF renderings. The latter two load the fonts they use, so if xml2rfc can
create the HTML and PDF, browsers and PDF viewers can display them.

I think you're going to have to point out examples other than the two below that constitute "a lot", because I'm not seeing it.

There are certainly issues of strange characters that are likely to confuse people, but the bit in section 2 about "People whose systems do not have the fonts needed to display part of a particular RFC" or section 3 about "many [characters] whose ability to be displayed is debatable" don't make sense in
HTML or PDF versions of RFCs.

This is the bit where Klensin is spot on. There are definitely ranges of characters for which font distribution to assorted OSes and browsers is at least delayed and often non-existent (Latin Extended-G [1] being the previously cited example, which was produced in 2021 but still has no support in MacOS or in Firefox AFAICT) which would count as "not hav[ing] the fonts needed" or "whose ability to be displayed is debatable". So I don't think your evaluation is correct, and I don't think a change to the text is needed.

Pete

[1] Perhaps your browser will do something better with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_Extended-G that will make it look more like https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1DF00.pdf, but on the most updated version of MacOS with the latest versions of Safari and Firefox, I can't see them.

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