Leo Broukhis <leob at mailcom dot com> wrote: > Most platforms display unknown printable characters as white > rectangles with hex digits in them. > In Doug's message, I saw a rectangle with 01F in the upper row, and > 3F3 in the lower row.
This is a handy feature, at least for character geeks like us, but "most platforms" might be a bit misleading here. There is a rather commonly used platform that starts with the letter W which does not do this. > Moreover, on any platform when users see unknown characters, they > search for a font, install it and are able to see in cleartext at > least something they can make sense of. For a RIS or any other > non-default-ignorable character on a non-vexillology-aware platform, a > font with stylized letters would be sufficient to read the intent of > the writer, and, as a free extra, to tell apart Liechtenstein and > Haiti without squinting. I think a useful bit of feedback on PRI #299 would be to inquire whether it is, in fact, a design goal to handle this use case of transparency of the individual letters on platforms, rendering engines, and/or fonts that don't support flag-tag composition. (Please, not "non-vexillology-aware." None of these platforms studies or analyzes flags. They assemble multiple characters into a single image.) If transparency on flag-tag-unaware platforms is not a design goal, it might be difficult to make the case that default-ignorable tag characters are a poor choice because they don't support transparency. -- Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸
