Re: How Firefox shows characters missing in font

[Lennart Borgman]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 9:30 PM, David De La Harpe
Golden<address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> It doesn't do anything. I includes only BMP (with private area) which
>> if I understand it correctly only is 0000 - ffff.
>>
>
> the sil font in particular, yeah.
>
>> But I know nothing about this. Which other pars are most important? On
>> wikipedia I see they divide it in 8 ranges (with one big unassigned
>> range). It looks like this could perhaps be handled in some way by for
>> example colors.
>>
>
> Shrug, or just use six hexdigits when there's room (only try for 6 for for
> chars outside the BMP, users can guess that if there's only 4, it's from the
> BMP, and for that matter perhaps if there's only 2 it's from the 8-bit
> range...)
>
>  You only need 3x5 pixels for quite legible hex, and IMO you can kinda make
> out stylised 3x4 too, at least in context.  Subpixel rendering might help in
> some cases.  And anyway, anyone really interested can ask emacs to describe
> the character, hex helps show
> there are missing glyphs and that they're distinct - a row of
> empty boxes could just be some missing line drawing glyphs, a row
> of distinct hex-filled boxes is probably foreign script.
>
> Cramming in 6 hex digits as 2x3 will be possible in a lot of cases on modern
> displays I reckon - anyone using a font size working out bigger than 10x20
> pixels or so (as attached for 3x4 stylised hexdigits).


Would not that be much more work when using the existing "SIL Unicode
BMP Fallback Font"?