Re: utf8 char display in buffer

[Miles Bader]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:
> Ken, I think this is a good idea so I have sent this along to Emacs devel.
>
>> Yet emacs puts a little box in the place of a character it cannot find
>> (or, per your explanation) possibly confused about.  The fact remains
>> that the little box is not a correct rendering of the code.  It is an
>> error... at least it is for me, because that's not what I typed in.  So
>> it is an error.  As an error, there should be a corresponding error
>> message, hopefully one (or more) which would help diagnose the problem.

An "error message" _when_?  Whether a character is displayable or not
isn't known until display time, and error messages for display issues
are generally a very bad idea.  For some display errors, the display
code will put messages in the *Messages* buffer (though they aren't
displayed to the user), but even that must be done with careful
consideration; currently they typically indicate that something
seriously screwy is going on (and a non-displayable character, however
annoying, isn't "seriously screwy").

If an "error message" were displayed, what would it say?  The only thing
I can think of is "no font could be found to display character FOO", but
that fact is already obvious from the little box.  Given no extra
detail, is a message even useful?

Maybe some sort of _once-only_ pop-up buffer note to the user saying
"little boxes indicate characters for which a font could not found; see
info manual section X.Y for details on blah blah"?  I suppose that could
help some people, but such a thing, even if once-only, would probably be
pretty annoying to non-complete-noob users, so ...

-Miles

-- 
[|nurgle|]  ddt- demonic? so quake will have an evil kinda setting? one that
            will  make every christian in the world foamm at the mouth?
[iddt]      nurg, that's the goal