It would be a nice way to address the issue. In an ideal world, every computer would have a "last resort" font so that it can *always* find a glyph for a particular codepoint, and there would then be no need for any glyph that says "sorry, can't display".
I think you will probably agree that an ideal world will never quite arrive (imagine simultaneously updating 10^9 computers on the day that Unicode 4.36 is released): the question is whether a world *approaching* perfection should make provision for imperfection-- and I think it should. After all, the instruction "If you see [], click here", remains valid whether the chance of seeing [] is 1/100, 1/1000000, or zero. The less likely that people are to need to follow that instruction, the better-- but the instruction remains valid even if they never actually need to use it. At 18:30 01/08/02 -0400, Tom Gewecke wrote: >Isn't font substitution more and more becoming the rule? Certainly I >expect Mac OS X to search all its fonts for glyphs for a given codepoint, >and when none can be found, I get the elegant symbols in the "Last Resort" >font, all of which have a similar form, as described by Deborah Goldsmith, >namely the glyphs from > >http://www.unicode.org/charts/ > >expanded to show the name and Unicode scalar value range of the block in >question. > >This sure seems like a nice way to address the issue. > > > > > > >
