> As a clarification, here is a sample web page:
>
> http://www.cardbox.com/missing.htm
>
> The requirement is to be able to display the first paragraph of the
> page in such a way that it makes sense in its reference to the text
> on the rest of the page.
>
> The character after the word "this:" in the first paragraph cannot
> be reliably represented by any existing Unicode character.
>
> Nevertheless, I believe it is legitimate to want to say what the
> first paragraph says.
Well, I would put it differently, if it were my web page.
Rather than:
<quote>
If any of the following text contains characters such as this: {blort}
then please change to a different font, or download a more recent
version of your current font.
</quote>
I would suggest something more along the line of:
<quote>
If you have trouble displaying any of the characters in
the text on this page, please consult <a href=xxx.html>
Troubleshooting Display Problems</a>.
</quote>
Then the troubleshooting page could provide a nice explanation
of the problem, show several neatly formatted *graphics* of
the kind of nondisplayable glyph issues (with alternate forms
picked from various fonts) that a user might run into, and
then give helpful links to actual font resources that would
help, or in the case of specialized data, actually provide a
usable font directly.
Such an approach:
A. Avoids font-specific circularity in your attempt to explain
to a user what is going on when the display is broken.
B. Provides much more useful information that will actually
have a better chance of helping the user get by the problem.
Also, since the problem(s) may not only be some nondisplayable
glyphs, the approach is extensible for whatever display help
is needed.
C. Doesn't depend on dubious assignments of a code point in
Unicode for a confusing (non-)use.
But if you insist on having a code point to stick directly in
a sentence like that above, I'd take the cue from James Kass:
> The missing glyph is the first glyph in any font. This is mapped to
> U+0000 and the system correctly substitutes the glyph mapped to
> U+0000 any time a font being used lacks an outline for a called
> character.
Thus, you have a reasonably good chance that if you try to
purposefully display the character U+0000, you will get the
missing glyph for the font in use. (Unless the application is
filtering out NULL characters.)
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Aug 01 2002 - 13:48:29 EDT